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11 


WHAT BRINGS SO MANY IRISH TO AMERICA!” 




A PAMPHLET 

WRITTEN BY HIBERNICUS: 

ir 

ONE PART OF WHICH 

EXPLAINS THE MANY CAUSES 


OF 




IRISH EMIGRATION; 

THE OTHER 


TlIE CONSISTENCY OR INCONSISTENCY 

OF 

u Native Americanissit }? as it is. 


“Yes, brother, curse with me that baleful hour 
When first Ambition struck at regal power; 

And thus polluting honour in its source, 

Gave wealth to sway the mind with double force 
Have we not seen, round Britain’s peopled shore, 
Her useful sons exchanged for useless ore ; 

Seen all her triumphs but destruction haste, 

Like flaring tapers bright’ning as they waste; 
Seen opulence her grandeur to maintain, 

Lead stern depopulation in her train, 

And over fields where scattered hamlets rose, 

In barren solitary pomp repose 1 

Have we not seen at pleasure’s lordly call, 

The smiling long-frequented village fall; 

Beheld the duteous son, the sire decay’d, 

The modest matron, and the blushing maid, 
Forc’d from their homes, a melancholy train, 

To traverse climes beyond the western main ; 
Where wild Oswego spreads her swamps around, 
And Niagara stuns with thund’ring sound V’ 


PUBLISHED FOR THE AUTHOR: 



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“What brings so many Irish to America?” 


This is a question which so often sounds in the ears of 
an Irishman, that, were he not aware that the American 
people are famed for learning, he might be inclined to at¬ 
tribute the frequent repetition of the enquiry to a very 
imperfect knowledge of the history of a land, once as 
famed for freedom, knowledge, and hospitality, as it is 
now proverbial for slavery, poverty and degradation. 
That such a question should be asked by the sciolist in 
the street, or the bigot on a rostrum, is not to me the least 
surprising; but that it should find its way to the offices of 
lawyers, and private parlors of their ladies, is something 
at which the scholar must be astonished—the philanthro¬ 
pist confounded. What brings so many Irish to America I 
And ought we not restrict foreign emigration ? have become 
the ruling topics of the day, in every city, town and ham¬ 
let. Nay more : bar-rooms have been converted into deba¬ 
ting schools, in which the latter of these interrogatories is 
discussed with more than Christian warmth and animation. 
It appears to me, that had these literati of the day but 
judged the feelings of foreigners by their own internal con¬ 
ceptions, this obscure oracle , at whose secret-holding doors 
they incessantly keep knocking, would from its inmost 
shrine at once reveal the solemn, sacred truth, that noth¬ 
ing, save a pure, holy love of liberty, “ brings so many 
Irish to America ” 

And how can it be otherwise? Is home so worthless 
that men can abandon it without cause ? The American 
who desires to try the experiment, may substantiate the 
fact in the following simple manner: Let him persuade 
his imagination that he is about to turn his back for¬ 
ever to,— 

“ Home ! sweet nurse of the heart, 

Where love and lore, alternate hours employ. 

To snatch from Heaven anticipated joy.” 



4 


Let him next stand upon the beach, the last dear foot¬ 
hold of his country;—shake for the last time in life, the 
age-worn hands of his affectionate parents—embrace, and 
clasp his arms round the throbing heart of a young, loving 
consort—bid an everlasting farewell to his young, smiling 
children—expose his life and fortune to the scowling ele¬ 
ments, and devouring ocean—live a friendless exile ii} a 
strange land, “ hewing wood and drawing water,” should 
he ever return he’ll pity an exile, and clear as a cuckoo 
sing in Columbia— 

“ Home, sweet home, there is no place like home.” 

This is a pretty fair contrast between an Irish and an 
American e^ile ; yet the balance lies against the lat¬ 
ter ; for, when we reflect, there is imaginary comfort in 
voluntary banishment. The American leaves home at 
his own free will, while the persecuted Irishman is pur¬ 
sued by the blood-dripling scourges of the tyrant, to the 
last perceptible promontory of his land, that as if to teach 
an independent lesson to man, exhibits its majestic head 
high above the foaming surges of the raging ocean, that 
chafe and foam like tyrants at its base. 

For Irishmen to leave home, although the world bears 
witness that their home is lovely and fruitful, as the hand 
of Heaven could make it, is now-a-days no wonder; but 
to see a free-born American forced by oppression from the 
stripes and stars of his country, is, thank Heaven ! what 
the Romans would call,— 

“ Rara avis in terris, nigroque gimillima cygno,’’ 

Indeed, it is as natural to see thousands of corpulent sons of 
the Emerald Isle, jumping like fishes from the waves, round 
the battery, of a fine summer’s evening, and consecrating 
themselves useful citizens of Washington’s land, as to see 
the snow fall in December, or the mountain torrent rush¬ 
ing from on high, to mingle with its mother ocean. This 
seems to be their first crime. For this intrusion, they are 
instantly arrayed before the tribunal of a band of upstart 
politicians, whose only claim to notice is, that they style 
themselves Native Americans,—a name which Irishmen 
honor and revere, as much as they repudiate, condemn and 


5 


disregard the selfishness of beardless bigots, who so impu¬ 
dently set themselves up to annul the principles and laws 
of the master-spirits of the Revolution. 

These, and these alone, are the illiterate and disap ¬ 
pointed office seekers, whose souls are too narrow to com¬ 
prehend “ what brings so many Irish to AmericaV But as 
it would be stooping too low, for a horseman, as well as 
subjecting himself to unprofitable labor, to keep whipping 
every little terrier that may bark from time to time about 
his horse’s feet; I pass them over unnoticed, aware that 
the best medicine that can be administered to such brain¬ 
less maniacs, is a double portion of silent contempt. If 
they are able, Samson-like, to pull asunder the pillars that 
support their country’s Constitution, they may one day 
succeed in their works of ^bigotry and proscription. To 
every intelligent American, who reveres the names of 
Washington , Franklin and Jefferson , it is as clear as the 
mid-day sun, that the inhabitants of the Universe, like the 
waters that encompass the earth, must seek a common 
level:—that if one portion of the human family take up 
their blissful abode in the Elysian fields of Republican 
liberty, the other portion will desire to pour down from 
the bleak, weather-beaten hills of kingly oppression, to 
participate in their freedom, to share their every blessing. 
This is to a letter, the spirit of the Declaration of Ameri¬ 
can Independence, which proclaims to the world, that, 
j* all men were created free and equal.” 

As I have already more than hinted, that it is no plea¬ 
sant undertaking for any man, no matter how little he re¬ 
gards his birth-place, to bid an eternal adieu to the scenes 
of his boyhood, his parents, wife, brothers, sisters, child¬ 
ren, and all that enchain man’s soul to his native land: I 
now wish to remind the American, that there was a time 
when Irishmen could find no richer home, than their own 
dear, lovely Erin. Early as the year 1956 of the world, 
that is, 300 years after the Flood, as we are informed by 
the “ book of invasions,” Ireland is known to have con¬ 
tributed amply towards supporting a large remnant of the 
human family, cast on her shore at such early period, by 


6 


the tide of emigration, under their great leader Farthola- 
nus. This was a colony of foreigners from Greece, but 
they met no Aaron Clark or u Native” to oppose their 
landing. Colony after colony succeeded, until the permanent 
settlement of the whole island was accomplished, A. M., 
2736, by Milesius, the fifth adventurer,—the illustrious 
progenitor of the Irish people, from whom all pride to be 
descended. 

Although her majesty Queen Victoria, in one of her re¬ 
cent speeches, delivered, no doubt to extract a smile, from 
her beloved Prince Albert, or to please her adulating cour¬ 
tiers, was forced for want of memory, to call classic Erin “a 
nameless land;” her majesty should recollect, that not only 
its name but geographical outlines were known to Julius 
Caesar, as may be seen from the following short description 
taken from the fifth book of his commentaries: “ Qua ex 
parte, est Hibernia, dimidio minor, ut existimatur, quam 
Britania.” At this time Britain was a slave—Ireland free. 
Pliny and Tacitus concur with Caesar in calling Ireland 
Hibernia, while Plutarch denominates it “ Ogygia,” which 
in his language signifies the most ancient Isle. Thus the 
impartial reader may plainly see that the beautiful Queen 
of Great Britain must have forgotten her history, or she 
could find some name for a land so well known to the 
ancients. 

From the landing of the Milesians to that execrated 
epoch in the annals of Ireland “ 1172,” a period of 2440. 
years, Ireland flourished under her own laws, as a bloom¬ 
ing rose under the dews of heaven. But scarcely had the 
foot-prints of usurpers polluted her shores, than her lovely 
vallies w^ere changed to a literal Golgotha. The happiness 
of Ireland during her own legislation, is beautifully por¬ 
trayed, by her own gifted Goldsmith, in the following 
couplet: 

“ A time there was, ere England’s griefs began, 

When every rood of ground maintain’d its man.” 

The first subject to which I desire to call the attention 
of those who so often ask, “ What brings so many Irish to 
(America?” is the wide line of unnatural demarkation drawn 


out by Strongbow and his successors, the moment they 
gained possession of Ireland. Any Christian man, whose 
heart warms with the love of his fellow creatures, would 
naturally think that all rancour and deep-rooted prejudice 
against the poor Irish, should die forever, on the very day 
they ceased resistance. 

This conjecture should be confirmed by the recollection 
that all nations and provinces subjugated by the old Greeks 
and Romans, were merely made tributary to their con¬ 
querors, after which they became amalgamated with their 
rulers; were permitted to recieve the benefit of their laws; 
or hold tenaciously to the belief of their fathers, and freely 
exercise their own provincial rights. When England her¬ 
self was conquered by the Normans, the savage fury and 
ruthless vengeance of the victors were allayed and satiated; 
their blood-stained swords returned to their scabbards, 
when she surrendered at the battle of Hastings. When 
Edward I. conquered Wales, all marks of distinction were 
obliterated; the English and Welsh became one people, 
consolidated as the particles that compose the pyramids of 
Egypt. China too, when conquered by the relentless Tar¬ 
tars, was equally indemnified as regards life and property. 
In fact, all nations, whether conquered by Jews, Turks, 
Vandals, or Mahometans, were left eligible to all the ad¬ 
vantages, and free to the adoption of any measures that 
might tend to their internal prosperity, provided they re¬ 
mained in subordination and acknowledged the sway of 
those by whom they were subdued. But in vain may the 
eye of the traveller wander over the desolated wastes of the 
world, to find a land so plundered,—a people so down¬ 
trodden, insulted, and persecuted, as Ireland and the Irish 
people. All credible historians, whose pens were guided 
by impartial justice, and whose minds were too free to be 
bribed by Parliament, unanimously agree, that whenever 
England wanted money or lands in Ireland, all she had to 
do, was 

“ Cry havoc, and let slip the dogs of war.” 

These more unsparing in their works of death than the 


8 


blood-hounds slipped by the murderous Pizarro on the 
wretched Peruvians, were never called back to their bar¬ 
racks, until men might 

“ Wade through seas of blood, 

And walk o’er mountains of slaughtered bodies.” 

The countryman of Washington, unaccustomed as he is 
to feel the lash of persecution, will scarcely believe, on the 
writer’s “ipse dixit,’ 1 that England’s policy has been, dur¬ 
ing the long period of six centuries, to alienate the Irish 
people ; to plunder them by fraud and peculation; to extin¬ 
guish their lunguage; to represent them to the world an 
ignorant rabble; to exclude them from all offices of honour 
and emolument; and finally to subject them to enduring 
vassalage, compared to which the Helots of Greece were 
more than emperors in the streets of Sparta. He deems it 
almost unworthy of credence, that refined England, who 
wants but power to extend her dominion and force the Re¬ 
ligion of a meek Redeemer, by the sword’s deadly point, as 
she has already done to the poor defenceless Chinese, could 
ever enact a law by which the murder of an Irishman was 
punishable by a fine; say ten or twenty shillings. For 
proof of these assertions, I refer him to Leland’s history of 
Ireland, pages 329 and 378, which read as follows : “ The 
murder of an Irishman was punishable only by a fine, a 
slight restraint on the rage of insolence and rapine; while 
the murder of an Englishman was a capital offence in the 
Irish nation. If any man of English race shall use any 
Irish name, the Irish language, or the Irish apparel, or any, 
mode or custom of the Irish, the act provides that lie shall 
forfeit lands and tenements, until he hath given security iii 
the court of chancery, to conform in every particular to the 
English manners; or if he have no lands, that he shall be 
imprisoned until the like security be given.” These are 
extracts that verify beyond the doubts of the most incredu¬ 
lous, that the Irish people have borne beyond the point of 
endurance, and that any part of the world, even the wilds 
of Africa, or the frozen regions of Siberia, would appear 
more like home, than the ill-fated land that gave them 
birth. 


9 


The life of a native-born, taken by a commissioned for 
feign assassin, was considered of no more value in one of the 
English courts, under the reigns of Henry VIII., Elizabeth* 
Edward IV., and Edward VI., than the head of a thistle 
amputated by the playful caprice of a school-boy. Under 
such reigns of proscription, and unexampled intolerance, 
gladly would any Irishman, possessed of an immortal soul, 
the image of his maker, seek a refuge beyond the limits of 
despotic power, but as seen by the subjoined clause, it was 
made penal for him to emigrate to any other portion of the 
world. “The person and goods of an Irishman attempting to 
transport himself without license, might be seized by any 
subject, who was to receive one moiety of the goods, for such 
service, the other to be forfeited to the king.” By this, all 
a man had to do to get possession of his neighbours farm, 
was to swear before a magistrate, that he endeavored to 
escape from servitude. Strange as this appears in the nine¬ 
teenth century, the law was in force in 1776, and was one 
of the leading grievances of which the immortal heroes of 
the American Revolution complain, in the Declaration ol 
Independence, where it is stated : “ he has obstructed the 
laws of Naturalization of foreigners, refusing to pass others 
to encourage emigration hither.” Good heavens! to what 
abject state of bestial slavery are men reduced, who have 
no control whatever over their own lives, and who are pro¬ 
hibited by the laws of tyrants, although more than brutal¬ 
ized at home, to seek beyond the waters a free asylum, 
where their sufferings might be alleviated, their bleeding 
wounds all healed ! 

To imagine the fire-brand of an incendiary applied to 
any man’s dwelling; to behold the flames rise up with 
columns of smoke to lick the heavens; to hear the inmates 
in the agonies of death, shriek for mercy and deliverance, 
when both were denied, would be but forming an accurate 
conception of the wretched inhabitants of a land, oppressed, 
tortured, and pillaged by despotic misrule, without the least 
facility to escape, without the slighest amelioration of their 
sufferings. Indeed had the first Saxon settlers extirpated 
by treachery, in which they have been well disciplined/ 


10 


the whole Irish people to a man; had they depopulated the 
Tallies and fired the mountains, from the Giant’s Causeway 
to Cape Clear, they would have advanced a step nearer to 
Christianity, than to confiscate their lands and subject them 
to a life of lingering starvation. 

For had Ireland been absolutely possessed, after the an¬ 
nihilation of all the former inhabitants, by a people of any 
other name or extraction, instead of her now being a blot 
upon the map of nations and her people a bye-word to the 
tyrants of Europe, she might now be as in days of yore, the 
college'of the west, the home of brave and learned heroes. 
Let the American traveller but visit that land of slavery, 
there, like Marius, ’mid the ruins of Carthage, he may form 
an opinion of its ancient dignity, by the desolation that ap¬ 
pears around. In the valley of Glendalough, a place in the 
county of Waterford, twenty miles southwest of Dublin, the 
mutilated walls and crumbled ruiiis of seven churches, like 
those of St. Augustine’s in Philadelphia,will tell at once the 
awful tale that an infuriated gang of sacrilegious plunder¬ 
ers, in their church-burning rage, found out that venerable 
spot, and dispelled nocturnal darkness by the flames of 
holy temples. But should curiosity invite him to. visit 
Drogheda, there the blood ol murdered Irishmen sticks in¬ 
delibly to the ivy-mantled walls, as if to show, that sanguin¬ 
ary Cromwell butchered five long days, where, as the poet 
writes: 

‘‘ No age was spared ; no sex, nay no degree ; 

Not infants in the porch of life were free ; 

The sick, the old who could not hope a day 
Longer by Nature’s bounty, not let stay ; 

Virgins and widows* matrons, pregnant wives, 

All died. ’Twas crime enough that they had lives.” 

The practice of firing temples dedicated to religious wor¬ 
ship, and denuding altars of their sacred vestures, were 
numbered among the other daily pastimes of Cromwell and 
his soldiers in Ireland; for like the tyrant Commodus, 
whose most harmless play was cutting off" his neighbours’ 
noses; they, while resting from the slaughter of pregnant 
women and prattling babies, kept their hands in practice 
by burning Catholic churches. Of all villains, none can 


11 


appear more detestable in the eyes of heaven, than he, who 
to glut his revenge against an enemy, sets a church in 
flames, erected to the honour and glory of the living God. 
In its best meaning it is Titan-like assailing heaven, and 
bidding open defiance to that 4Jmighty Deity who made 
the world out of nothing, and who, in pure love for man, 
sent his only begotten Son to die for the sins of all born 
into the world. It matters not the value of a rotten nut, 
whether he is a Catholic, an Episcopalian, a Baptist, a 
Methodist, a Unitarian, or a Universalist, when he attempts 
to hurl the flaming brand within the walls of any edifice, 
in which any body of men, white, black, or brown, assem¬ 
ble on the Holy Sabbath to worship God, according to the 
dictates of their consciences, that instant 

“ Beware of him ; 

Sin, death and hell have set. their marks on him, 

And all their ministers attend on him.” 

I might follow up this account of the barbarities com¬ 
mitted, and the blood which marked the vestiges of those 
whose creed was, to plan from their first landing, the utter 
extinction of the Irish race. I might trouble the reader 
with the perusal of a thousand documents from the pens 
of those who made it their greatest boast never to have 
given quarters to the Irish people; but for birth place alone 
butchered them as sheep and cattle in the shambles; but 
the following summons to Haw T arden Castle, by one qf 
Cromwell’s beloved and confidential officers, will suffice to 
prove that I have not exaggerated, nor could the pen of 
man do so. It may be found in Rushworth, V. 300 page, 
and reads as follows: 

“I presume you very well know, or have heard of my 
condition and disposition, and that I neither give nor take 
quarter. I am now with my firelocks, which never yet 
neglected opportunity to correct rebels, ready to use you as 
I have done the Irish, but loath am I to spill my country¬ 
mens’ blood.” Tugs. Sanford. 

Had these been born on Irish soil, they would find no mer¬ 
cy. The studentof American history can not fail to perceive 
a strict similarity between this consummate villain ap4 


12 


the tory General Grey, who assassinated, in cold blood. 
Colonel Bayler’s troop of light dragoons, while sleeping in 
a barn at Tappan town, the posts of which to this day are 
stained with their patriotic blood. 

Tappan, on a smaller scale, represents the indiscriminate 
slaughter of men, women and children at Drogheda, while 
the Vandal-like cruelty of Grey exhibits the career of a 
licensed murderer, whose proudest boast was, never to 
have given quarter to the surrendered Irish. Although 
Cromwell agreed to give quarter to all that would lay down 
arms, and all by necessity agreed, we will see by his own 
despatches to parliament, how many of those valiant men 
were spared. 

“ Sir : It has pleased God to bless our endeavours at 
Drogheda; after battering, we stormed it. The enemy 
were about 3000 strong in the town. They made a stout 
resistance, and near one thousand of our men being entered, 
the enemy forced them out again. But God giving a new 
courage to our men, they attempted again, and entered, 
beating the enemy from their defences. The enemy had 
made three retrenchments both to the right and left, when 
we entered, all which they were forced to quit; being thus 
entered, we refused them quarter, having the day before 
summoned the town. I believe we put to the sword the 
whole number of the defendants. I do not think thirty of 
the whole number escaped with their lives: those that did 
are in safe custody for the Barbadoes. Since that time the 
enemy quitted to us Trim and Dundalk. This hath been 
a marvellous great mercy ! ! The enemy being not willing 
to put an issue on a field battle, had put into this garrison 
almost all their prime soldiers, being about 3000 horse and 
foot, under the command of their best officers, Sir Arthur 
Asten being made governor. There were some seven or 
eight regiments, Armand’s being one, under the command 
of Sir Edmund Verney. I do not believe, neither do I 
hear, that any officer escaped with his life, save only one 
lieutenant, who, I hear, going to the enemy, said, that he 
was the only man that escaped of all the garrison. The 
enemy were filled upon this with much terror; and truly, 


13 


I believe this bitterness will save much effusion of blood, 
through the goodness of God ! ! ! 1 wish that all honest 

hearts may give the glory of this to God alone, to whom 
indeed the praise of this mercy belongs! For instruments 
they were very inconsiderable the work throughout. 

O. Cromwell.” 

If after the perusal of this letter, any man can find, • 
among the darkest deeds of Nero, Caligula, Tiberius, or 
Domitian, any catalogue of crimes so infernal in their na¬ 
ture, as these perpetrated by this hypocritical ruffian, or 
rather without over-straining the English language for a 
name, incarnate demon; “ I pause for a reply.” Hear 
him, after wading through torrents of blood, and trampling 
on heaps of mangled bodies, calling upon all honest hearts 
to give the glory of this to God alone ! “ to whom, indeed, 
the praise of all this mercy belongs.” Glory ! for what ? 
For the wilful assassination of 3000 men, women and child¬ 
ren ! O, merciful God ! didst thou ever delight in the ef¬ 
fusion of human blood? Can thy grace be obtained by 
the destruction of those created to thy own image and like¬ 
ness ? Didst thou, whose only weapons were, while estab¬ 
lishing the kingdom of thy Father on earth, prayer and 
fasting, exhortation and miracles, nerve the arm of any 
mortal, to deluge the land with the blood of thy creatures, 
and attribute the carnage to that Eternal being, who de¬ 
livered from Sinai’s sacred mount, ’mid thunder and light¬ 
ning, the awful mandate 113" Thou shall not kill.jzji To 
that immutable, omnipotent God, who healed the wound 
of Malchus, checked the hand of his disciple Peter, and de ¬ 
clared, for the instruction of future generations, that “ they 
icho take the sword , shall perish by the sword” 

But, Christian reader, reflect that it is the same Jehovah 
who forbade Peter to wound, inspired Cromwell to mur¬ 
der. The only possible way to account for this alogy, 
according to the spirit of the above quoted letter, is that 
he was a Jew whom the Apostle Peter wounded—they 
were all Irishmen, who fell by the unsparing sword of the 
great defender of the Puritanic sect. This makes a mate¬ 
rial difference, as Jews and Gentiles were alike to God, 


14 


by the English laws, the Irish were deemed beyond the 
pale of salvation, and consequently should fall before the 
hands of pious men , as grass before the scythes of mowers. 

But, perchance the Jew was smitten without cause, 
while the “ Idolatrous Irish” merited even more than ever 
they received. Be this as it may, every man may judge 
for himself. Sacred writ informs us that the Jew came 
out with sticks and staves, to seize and crucify the Son of 
God,—the Irishmen lived in the land of their fathers, and 
believed in the religion ordained by His divine will, and 
sanctified by His precious blood. Yet this same eternal, 
never changing God, condemns the rashness of Peter in 
Asia, and heals the wound inflicted for his Lord and 
Master ; while 1650 years after, when looking down from 
His celestial mansion, on the massacre of 3000 Catholics, 
at Drogheda, he is said to have thus addressed his pious 
foliowei’, Oliver Ci'omw^ell: Well done, thou good and 
faithful servant Olivei',—because thy sword reeks with 
the heart’s blood of imploring females, and helpless inno¬ 
cents ; because thou hast assisted the destroying Angel in 
his works of human destruction, and spared no flesh within 
thy reach; because thou hast fired churches, murdered 
Priests, pillaged altars, depopulated cities, villages and 
hamlets; thy zealous and meritorious deeds shall not be 
cancelled from the archives of Heaven, until I call the liv¬ 
ing and the dead to judgment in the valley of Jehosaphat. 

The ravages and murders committed by St. Legei*, 
Coote, Ireton Monroe, Gi'eenville, and Hamilton, were 
nothing inferior to those of their master, Cromwell. For 
twenty-five miles around, as the historian I'elates, was 
effected the utter extermination of man and beast. Sir 
William Petty, who wrote on behalf of the Government, 
represents the number destroyed by sword, famine, hard¬ 
ship, and transportation, between 23d Oct., 1641, and the 
same day of said month, 1652, to have been no less than 
five hundred thousand. This bloody war, if war it can be 
called, of 1641, was commenced on the lying information 
of a base, perjured wretch, named Owen Connolly, bribed 
|>y the lorsQ* parliament, to swear away the lives and pro*- 


15 


perty of iiiofferiding Irishmen. He having obtained the 
thirty pieces of silver, swore that the Irish were on the eve 
of a rebellion, and thus opened agate for English jobbers to 
confiscate the whole estates of the Irish land-holders. 
This was the only means adopted by England, whenever 
she wished to seize on real estate, and extend her domin¬ 
ion in unhappy Ireland. Her gold dripling with the blood 
of its lawful owners, was offered as a bribe to some per¬ 
jured outcast, on whose guilty soul the father of lies might 
have a thousand previous mortgages. The three most 
execrated names in the annals of Ireland, for perjury of this 
description, are Armstrong, Reynolds, and Connolly. How 
true it is, that 

“ Falsehood and fraud grow up in every soil; 

The product of all climes.” 

The latter of these double dyed traitors brought alasting 
curse on his country, that, like the corroding canker, has 
fed for centuries on her very vitals. The rebellion being 
ended, after much blood-shed, as already stated, all the 
chief commanders met in counsel, when Lord Broghill pro¬ 
posed that the whole kingdom would be surveyed, so that 
the number of acres might be known, with their quality, 
and then every soldier to bring in his bill of arrears, and so 
give to every man by lot, as many acres as might equal 
the amount of his arrears. This met the cordial approba¬ 
tion of all CromwelPs fortune hunters, and accordingly 
Ireland being surveyed, and the number of acres known, 
the most fruitful land was valued at four shillings an acre, 
and down so low as one penny. The names of all who 
were in arrears being then taken, they drew lots, so as to 
know what part might fall to the lot of each man. Thus 
the whole of Ireland was divided among the merciless plun¬ 
derers of Cromwell. Ten millions of the best land in the 
world, was, by a single scroll of the pen, delivered over to 
those, as a reward for the vast number of natives they had 
killed. This statement is not hyperbolical, when the 
reader reflects, that in the days of Ireland’s glory, the Earl 
of Desmond Tyrone and Tyrconnell, owned one million 
one hundred thousand acres. By CromwelPs special or- 


16 


der, six millions of acres were confiscated, and after the 
final defeat of King James’ adherents, 1,500,000, which in 
all amount to eight millions, seven hundred thousand. 
This is pretty near the ten millions stated, and would prob¬ 
ably surmount the estimation, had all the private estates^ 
taken away from time to time, been added. To such as 
would forswear their religion, sometimes a part, and often 
the whole of their estate was given; but in no instance 
was the Catholic allowed to inherit his property, or enjoy 
his religious belief undisturbed. This is a sufficient rea¬ 
son, I trust, to account for the well known fact, that in 
Ireland, with few exceptions, all wealthy land-holders are 
protestants, while the Catholics constitute what is termed 
a multitude of mendicants. This is, unquestionably, 
“what brings so many Irish to America.” 

All, to a man, who proved not traitors to their country, 
and who renounced not the faith of their fathers, were ex¬ 
pelled from “ house and home,” while the renegades, who 
bartered their God for the mammon of the world, are now 
those haughty, overbearing lordlirigs, at whose feet the 
peasantry of Ireland are forced to bow, like Israelites be¬ 
fore the golden calf. Thus it is, that the traveller beholds 
so many gorgeous castles, built after the fashion of the 
“tower of Babel,” in all parts of Ireland. Like their su¬ 
percilious inmates, they stand so high in the centre of 
thousands of verdant acres never tilled, “ since Adam was 
a boy,” that they frown contemptuously on the poor man’s 
cot, and bury their heads so high in the clouds of ambi¬ 
tion, that they are deaf to the cries of thousands supplica¬ 
ting at their base. The reader is aware, that there are 
but two extremes in Ireland, too much affluence, or too 
much pqverty. Because the poor man’s ancestor remained 
faithful to his God, his creed, and his country, he must 
abandon all that’s dear to him in life, encounter the raging 
waves of the wide Atlantic, to obtain a living in the pesti¬ 
lential swamps of Savannah aad New Orleans, while the 
rich usurper lives a modern “ Dives,” and fattens on the 
fruits of his ancestorial apostacy. There is no remunera¬ 
tion in the old world for any transcendant qualifications of 


17 


which man may be possessed. All is hereditary. The rich 
man’s son is born with gold, titles, honor and emolument, 
while the poor man’s child comes into the world, with the 
word slave seared upon his forehead, doomed to toil and 
want forever. This is the response of the English oracle 
a slave he was born, a slave he must die. No Irishman can 
create himself Lord, Duke, or Earl, unless at some period 
of his life he registers his name in the book of infamy, and 
oppression of his native land. Avowed hostility, and eter¬ 
nal rancour against the green land that gave him birth, are 
the gradus, by which any Irishman can ascend the golden 
chariot of lordly honors. 

“ Unprized are her sons, till they learn to betray ; 

Undistinguished they live, if they shame not their sires ; 

And the torch that would light them to dignity’s way. 

Must be caught from the flame, where their country expires.” 

Having briefly shown, that from Ireland’s first acquain¬ 
tance with England, she has been a plundered land, and 
that those who were so fortunate as to escape the sword, 
were not left a square acre of their fathers’ land ; I trust 
that every thinking man ; every friend of liberty, and every 
countryman of the Heaven-born Washington, will for the 
future be able to answer what u brings so many Irish to 
AmericaV’ > .Leaving, then, the “ despised Irish,” so called, 
like the Canaanites of old, dispersed over all Nations, and 
suffering exiles from the green fields of Erin, I now advert 
to the intolerable mountain of taxation heaped upon the 
remnant that remained at home, since the introduction of 
that mechanical power, the screw , or Established Church . 
But before I advance any thing against an institution so 
purely divine, I would again respectfully remind the reader 
that nothing so unholy as ill-founded prejudice could stim¬ 
ulate me to write one solitary phrase against the doctrine 
of any sect or denomination. My firm conviction is, that 
man’s political and religious belief, should be as free and 
unshackled, as the liquid atmosphere that floats on high, 
and enshrouds the universal world. 

But I would ask any unbiased American, who has 
offered libations sixty-eight years to the genius of liberty, 


18 


and who has been accustomed to pray and worship alter 
the manner of his fathers; how he should like any Church, 
established by law, in the centre of the United States, 
before whose altar he w T ould be compelled to worship, or 
forfeit a certain amount of his own peculiar property ? 
Suppose he belonged to a church, in which the thirteen- 
fourteenths of his countrymen worshipped their God in 
their best manner; that they believed there was no better 
way by which they could save their immortal souls ; and 
suppose the other one-fourteenth of the population took it 
into their heads to have a different church for themselves, 
the question at issue is, would he like to be forced, against 
his will, to conform to that church, in which he believed 
not,—whose tenets his very heart and soul abhorred 1 
But let us go farther, and suppose that certain penal laws, 
enacted against the immortality of souls, were so modified 
that the one fourteenth were permitted by Parliament to 
make a proposition to the thirteen fourteenths, and grant 
them religious toleration, provided that, wdienever they 
built a church for themselves, they should build a more 
costly one, with a higher steeple, for the little party, and 
support the ministers of both, all the days of their lives ; 
would not that free American answer, from the recesses of 
his soul—No ! little party, we will build and repair our 
own church, as our fathers taught us—we will educate 
and ordain our own ministers, support them as we please, 
to the best of our ability, and we only desire that you 
shall do the same. As we believe not in your law-estab¬ 
lished doctrine, we have no desire to support your church, 
Atlas-like, on our shoulders, while we live. It is too un¬ 
reasonable to ask fourteen men to build a church for one, 
so long as that man may find ample place in that already 
built. Should he find fault, and object against the faith of 
millions, living and dead, he may build his meeting-house 
at his own expense, and alone enjoy the blessings of his 
Heavenly inspiration. All we request is, that he shall 
prove his mission from God, by going to work peaceably, 
leaving us the enjoyment of our opinion, while he culti¬ 
vates more perfectly the seed of salvation sown by our 


19 


Lord and Savior during the thirty-three years he lived on 
earth. 

This language, which I know would fall from the lips of 
every free American, would not do for the proscribed Irish. 
Their land at this time was after being deluged with a 
crimson flood, and England remembered the words of 
the savage conqueror,—“ the only portion of the vanquish¬ 
ed is to suffer.” The Catholics at this time were as four¬ 
teen to one, the Protestants as one to fourteen. In vain 
did the former argue, that the Apostles died Catholics, and 
that had there been any falsity attached to that faith, they 
had a better right to know, than the Apostles of the estab¬ 
lished church, who lived 1500 years afterwards, and were so 
far away from our Savior’s sepulchre. But in vain may a 
fat lamb bleat for mercy, in the presence of a hungry wolf. 
The Catholics ever since have been compelled to support 
tyvo churches, the one established by the son of man,— 
the other by the king of England. This incubus has 
pressed heavy on them for 300 years. Like the fabled 
Encilaudus , they have complained and groaned, turned and 
struggled, still they feel the same unholy weight, still they 
find themselves the same unpitied, starving, and insulted 
people. Poor Ireland appears to the world a smitten 
angel, writhing in the pangs of oppression ; while England 
remains the same inexorable demon, pressing down with 
the cloven hoof of persecution, on her fruitful bosom, and 
plunging to the hilt the hell-forged blade of intolerance, 
through the very centre of her bleeding heart. The nine¬ 
teenth century, and the Christian world, declare that her 
sufferings .should be no more; while England swears, by 
the towering pile of butchered Chinese, she shall suffer for¬ 
ever,—her persecution shall be eternal. Yes, as the Lord 
liveth, says England, while the nations of the earth shall 
do me homage; while.the blood of millions overflow my 
foot-prints, and the sepulchres of kingdoms rise where I 
travel; while blood, conflagrations, ruins and desolation 
attest my royalty, Ireland shall groan—her sons shall live 
in slavery. 

This, if not in words, in literal meaning is the oath ob- 


20 


served by England more than 600 years, against the liberty 
of her sister country. The machine by which she per¬ 
formed this, and carried all her designs so effectually into 
execution, is called by the Irish “ the parsons’ screwy” by 
the English the “ Established Church” The purport ap¬ 
plied to each of these terms, seems to be well understood 
by both parties. Although the Irish in other respects may 
“ know but little,” they are by no means ignorant of the 
true acceptation of the term Established Church, so far as 
it affects the Irish nation. Without diving into the classi¬ 
cal and pellucid fountains of Greek and Latin, they derive 
the simple definition, which they judiciously apply from 
the English verb, to screw, which means to force, implying 
thereby that the Established Church, like a screw, was 
forced through their whole nation, as that mechanical 
power is forced through a large log of hickory wood, by 
dint of physical force. The English, equally correct in 
the name given, derive the participial adjective estab¬ 
lished, from the English verb to establish, which means to 
settle firmly, well aware that it would l3e equally futile 
and foolish, to search the vocabularies of antiquity to find 
a name for a Church, which sprang up at such a late 
period, so long as the English language was still living, 
and fully competent to afford a satisfactory appellation. 
As the English readily admit that their Church works 
like a screw, by scooping turns through the Irish people, 
so the Irish bear witness that any Church must be well 
established, while supported by a population of nine mil¬ 
lions of Catholics. Thus it is, that a word may often have 
two purports, and each perfectly right. The word sacer, 
in Latin, means both blest and cursed, so that it would 
not avail the Established Church a sixpence, had its first 
founders named it Ecclesia Sacra in England; the Irish 
people, aware that names change not substances, would 
still find it a curse, under that or any other name. Should 
it be called Coelum by the English, the Irish have every 
reason, so far as it affects themselves, to call it Orcus. 

I now wish to describe, briefly, the number of men, their 
names and occupation, that officiate around the sanctuary 


21 


of that great law established edifice. Mark them as they 
come, although very familiar to all Irishmen,blest be God! 
they are yet unknown in the land of Washington. The 
Parson may justly be called the great “primum mobile” of 
the whole. On Sunday evening you may hear this vener¬ 
able divine preaching a long charity sermon to his little 
dock, at the end of which, with up-lifted eyes, he prays that 
the hearts of his hearers may be open to charity, which 
alone can wing their souls to the mansions of eternal bliss. 
On Monday morning mark his footsteps! They are di¬ 
rected towards the wretched cabin of a needy widow. Be¬ 
hold him followed by the tithe proctor, sub-proctor, bailiff, 
sub-bailiff, barony ranger, (so called by the peasants,) and 
a retinue of police, whose bayonets are naked, and whose 
swords glisten in the sunshine. The parson first enters, 
having bowed his head, bent his knees, and stooped his 
back somewhat lower than usual, not so much to show his 
collegiate politeness in the presence of a poor old woman, 
as to save his castor’s bottom from a contusion it might 
otherwise receive from the lowness of the widow’s door, 
which, of course, was never built after the model of a costly 
glebe, to attract the admiration of the passing nobility. He 
is entered. The poor widow is startled from her morning 
sleep by the much-feared sound, u Pay the tithes to your 
pal ish minister .” In vain may she apologize; in vain may 
she point out her distress, and the penury that appears in 
her lowly dwelling; in vain may she tell him in the most 
imploring language, that she has this or that article ready 
for the next market, and that she only begs a few days for 
“ God’s sake,” at the expiration of which, she will combine 
all her little means together, and pay the tithes to the last 
farthing. Short as may have been the interval between 
Sunday evening, when he preached the charity sermon, 
and Monday morning, when he is collecting tithes, all his 
charity is forgotten. The widow’s words fall on his ears 
as rain drops on a swan’s back. In the dignity and im¬ 
portance of a gentleman, he turns on his heel, when the 
charitable language piously flows from his lips: “ Officers 
do your duty.” Reader, as a man who never may have 


22 


seen a tithe proctor, “ Guess” what is that duty? If you 
can’t, mark the pale and agitated countenance of the forlorn 
widow; see the sparkling tears roll from her eyes as she 
beholds her helpless family; experience teaches her what 
that duty is; she knows beyond the conceptions of any 
man. A thousand times previous she heard the same un¬ 
merciful mandate. A thousand times she beheld her own 
and her childrens’ bed denuded of its coverings, and all 
consigned to the more merciful blasts of a cold winter’s 
tempest. She, and such as she only can understand the 
word duty, in the minister’s language, as this part of his 
weekly sermon, or rather text for every day’s sermon, can 
never escape the widow’s memory:—the ravages it leaves 
behind inscribe it deeply on her heart. The proctor’s duty 
as commanded by the parson, is to rob the widow and 
starve her orphans. As the preacher is both parson and 
magistrate, his commands must have force. Perchance, 
the pale-faced widow and starving orphans owe for as much 
land as maybe included within the walls of their little hut 
four or five shillings. She must work on low diet, and 
sleep without bed-clothes, for the divine parson has by this 
time accumulated the sum of five hundred pounds fifteen 
shillings, and only wants the widow’s “ mite,” or five shil¬ 
lings more, to make it even money. This is the first appli¬ 
cation of the mighty screw. Two proctors, two bailiffs, 
and generally a half dozen of “ peelers,” are the hands em¬ 
ployed to screw out the widow and orphans’ shillings. 
These, as the ten plagues of Egypt, visit the Irish, the last 
generally ten times more destructive than all the rest. 

“ What one plunderer left, the next will seize.” 

Nor dare the most brave dispute their power. Unlike 
all other law^s in the world, are those of England. The 
fat parson preaches in the Established Church; the Catho¬ 
lic, who never saw his pulpit nor heard his sermon, must 
support him for life, and pay him a salary, if not more, not 
less than a thousand pounds a year, by which he may be 
enabled to buy silks for his wife, and gew-gaws for his 
young ladies, while their own wives and daugnters must 
wear coarse flannels. This is levied round on all the par- 


23 


ish, and so as not subject him to the cost of suing, he is r.o 
more a minister of the gospel than a magistrate of the law. 
He preaches on the Sabbath, issues decrees on Mondays, 
and attends court every Wednesday. Thus he has all law 
as well as sanctity in his own hands. The poor man, who 
refuses or is unable to pay the tithes, is immediately cited 
before a multitude of these “men of God,” who, to prove 
themselves the ministers of his gospel, as well as magis¬ 
trates of the laws of England, only send him to work his 
passage some six months on an instrument called by some, 
the “devil’s trapsticksby others the English threadmill. 
This, by whatever name it may be denominated, is one of 
the most effective instruments ever invented for breaking 
the legs of insolvent debtors. The parsons could as easily 
send their recusant parishioner seven years to gaol, or any 
where else they pleased, but as ministers of the gospel, they 
desire to be clement. They give up their own power to the 
proctor, in these words : “As my father, and England sent 
me, I also send you.” Pillage and plunder as you may, but 
return not to me without money, and hear not the com¬ 
plaints of the most wretched before they shall have paid 
the last farthing. Tithes are of holy origin and should be 
paid first.” 

Though Irishmen are called brave men, I saw very few 
so brave as to go to law twice, with any of these half min¬ 
isters and half lawyers. ’Tis true I often saw their “shila- 
lahs” play round the devoted head of the old proctor, and 
might discern his round form for many days after in the 
gutter, still his person being considered inviolable as the 
Priest of Cibele, the victor would be obliged by law, to 
atone for his wickedness, and repent his rashness on the 
same old rusty threadmill. There is no lenity for any 
Catholic, who refuses to support a church whose doctrines 
he totally disbelieves. I recollect not the time that an of¬ 
fender escaped with impunity. The dotrine of the estab¬ 
lished church, is precisely to the Irish Catholics, what 
English opium is to the Chinese; still they must use it, 
should it instantly poison their souls and bodies, or buy it 
dearly, and throw it away. During three hundred years, 


24 


they have chosen the latter of these alternatives, all which 
time the screw has been in operation; but he happened 
worse, who complained most, as appears by the following 
statement of costs, described by a protestant writer, to 
which the courts subject all who refuse to pay tithes 
willingly : 

“ The whole sum in dispute is six shillings; the fee to 
counsel is a guinea. The very first step, therefore, that a 
poor man takes for his defence, he has to pay nearly four 
times the amount of the demand that he contests. He has 
next to pay two citations for his two witnesses, thirteen 
shillings and six pence; that is to say, twelve shillings and 
six pence for the first, and one shilling for the second. The 
trial generally ends in a decree against the unfortunate 
peasant, which is followed up by a monition; and the costs 
of both are stated to add nearly two pounds, sixteen shil¬ 
lings and eight pence to his losses. He is then handed over 
to the secular arm: the parson processes his wretched par- 
ishoner to the civil bill court; there he is decreed,as a mat¬ 
ter of course, without even being allowed (strange to say l) 
to enter into the merits of his case. And what costs follow? 
The costs of the decree are one shilling and eleven pence. 
The costs of the warrant, Is. Id.; the fees of the bailiff who 
executes the warrant, are 2s. 4d.; the fees of the two keepers 
who watch the distress for four days and nights, amount 
(at 2s. 6d. a day for each) to £1; and lastly, the auctioneer’s 
fees come to 6s. 3d.; making altogether the sum of £6.12s. 2d. 
So that the clergyman sells the whole crop to satisfy the 
tithes, and turns the miserable wretch, his wife and chil¬ 
dren to the road, to beg, or to steal, or to starve. High 
spirited as the poor Irishman may be, he will never have 
the courage to renew the contest against such powerful 
odds.” 

Here are £6. 12s. 2d. accruing from an original sum of 
only six shillings. Had the poor man refused to pay this, 
as the ballance or part of his annual rent, he should de¬ 
serve no compassion ; but because he believes, that all 
churches should rest on their own foundations, and that 
Church of England men, as well as Catholics, should up- 


hold their own religion and pay their own ministers, he 
falls into the hands of a council of divines, by whom he is 
speedily ejected, with his wife and family, cast a pennyless 
wretch to wander round the world, to sink or to swim. 
This the men of God call justice and religion; will they 
enlighten the world with a dissertation on extortion and 
hypocrisy? Nothing sounds more pleasant than to hear 
some of these saintly men, in country places, arguing with 
fanners, and proving their claims to the tithes, then in the 
actual possession of the proctor, carrying away for a holy 
purpose. Of course the parson, more skilled than the far¬ 
mer in the formation of syllogisms, proves from varnished 
and sophisticated arguments, that tit hes are of divine origin, 
and should consequently be paid before all other demands. 
I recollect in my school-boy days to have heard one of these 
long contested debates, between an old farmer and a young 
minister, who had a little previous come into the parish. 
As nearly as I can remember, the argument ran thus, the 
parson making the best headwvay he could, against adverse 
winds: 

Parson . Sir, had you but opened the sacred volume, 
you would there find, that the patriarch Abraham, having 
vanquished the three confederate plunderers of his nephew 
Lot, on his return offered the tenth part of all his spoils to 
the high priest, Melchisedech, who then offered the sacrifice 
of bread and wine to the living God. This proves beyond 
all manner of doubt, that tithes must be of sacred origin; 
for the benefactor was the great father of the faithful, and 
the recipient no less a personage than the representative ot 
the Messiah promised for the salvation of the world. The 
fact of father Abraham having delivered up spontaneously 
any part of his possessions to the holy man, is one irrefra¬ 
gable proof, to show to the most unthinking that tithes are 
not only ancient, but the heavenly gifts of a, willing soul. 

Parmer. Reverend Sir : In my rural simplicity , I can’t 
conceive what bearing the holy patriarch’s offering can have 
on this little bouse and lot of mine. If I dare speak so bold, 
I think thou art not quite so holy as Melchisedech, nor I 
so faithful as Abraham. Abraham made a voluntary sacri- 

4 


26 


fice of his only son Isaac; but it does not follow that all 
fathers must do the same, for the plain reason, that God 
does not demand it of all men. Had the holy man known 
that his free offering would he so misconstrued in after 
ages, as to send the tithe-proctor to seize by force, what he 
gave with free will, I firmly believe he would never have 
sown the seed of plunder, yvdiich so often blossomed in blood 
throughout poor Ireland. I can perceive a very wide differ¬ 
ence between the relation that Abraham and the holy priest 
bore to each other, and that which exists between the par¬ 
son, or proctor, and a poor Irish farmer. In the first place, 
the priest and patriarch were of the same religion, so that 
the munificence of the latter only gave birth to that popular 
adage—“ it is never lost, what a friend gets.” In the sec¬ 
ond place, Melchisedech permitted Abraham to save his 
soul, by the presentation of a free gift; but the time is Qot 
remembered in Ireland, when the farmer w T as left long 
enough to reflection to know whether he should redeem his 
soul or not, by a voluntary donation to the ministers of the 
Established Church. The gift obtained by the peeler’s 
push-back, and that conferred by the right hand of the 
heavenly patriarch, appear to me, as they must to all men, 
very dissimilar. Finally, I heard you not long since, when 
discussing Religion with A. B. On his quoting a text from 
the book of Genesis, in support of his doctrine, you objected 
to its validity, on the ground that all things practiced in 
the old law, are nullified under what you call the Christian 
dispensation. This would be truly consoling doctrine to 
the poor farmer, had you but left the tithes among all other 
superfluous things, to the Jews, and never collect them un¬ 
der this new dispensation. 

Parson. Old man, it is your ignorance, or if I may mod¬ 
ify the expression, forgetfulness of ancient history, that 
causes you to talk so inconsistent. We have ten thousand 
documents to prove that Church-tithes are indispensably 
necessary for the propagation of the faith, and that they 
should be considered appendages to the temple of God, 
spread over the whole kingdom. But as I showed suffi¬ 
ciently explicit from holy writ, for any educated man to 


27 


see, that tithes of any description, are not an imposition, 
arising from the tyranny of man, but emanate directly from 
that all-wise Being, who sometimes indirectly, and often 
opposed to the will of mortals, burthens our bodies that 
our souls may be saved. I’m now ready, for your and your 
neighbours’ instruction, to prove that tithes were no strange 
impositions to the old Romans, although heathens to a 
man. They never murmured at paying what they deemed 
a religious obligation; but handed down the laudable prac¬ 
tice, as they did the large fund of their refined knowledge, 
to the kings and emperors of Europe. If you but studied 
the history of the Roman Republic, you would discover 
that from the time the clement Tiber delivered Romulus 
to the protection of a wolf, to the time in which great Au¬ 
gustus left the capital a city of marble, and ever afterwards 
to its final subjugation by the northern savages, tithes were 
considered holy as the eternal fires, fed by the Vestal Vir¬ 
gins, or the sacred geese, that rode in triumph in their gold- 
embroidered chariots. From the most refined Epicurean, 
that slumbered in the lap of luxury, to the fierce, puissant 
Hercules, that conquered all before him, from the mouth of 
the Tiber to the farther side of the river Styx, all and each 
paid tithes to their lawful superiors. The learned Dionysius 
informs us that so hospitable was this conquering warrior, 
Hercules, that after he had vanquished his powerful antago¬ 
nist Cacus, seeing that no man had sufficient prowess to de¬ 
mand the tithes of him, invited Evander and all his jolly 
companions to a feast, at the getting up of which he is said 
to have spent about one-tenth of what he forced from Cacus, 
both cattle and money; which was nothing else than paying 
tithes, in an honourable fashion, at his own free will. Had 
he kept to himself the whole amount gained by his pugilis¬ 
tic might, no man living could have dared call him to an 
account; yet so meritorious did he deem tithes recom¬ 
mended by the Senators, or as we would say, members of 
the House of Lords, that lie found no contentment before lie 
expended the one-tenth of his property in the best way he 
knew. Here, again, we see that tithes are old as the world 
itself, and should therefore be paid with a free heart and a 



28 


willing mind: for if we go back to the days of our first 
parents, we find in the terrestrial paradise, the woman, 
who was the weaker, both in body and mind, offering the 
one-half of her whole property to her husband Adam. She 
plucked but one apple, and as if to perpetuate the tithe 
system to the latest period of posterity, she consigned to 
him one half. I trust I have now fully convinced you, 
from the examples of the mighty Hercules and our first 
parents in Eden, that tithes, as collected in Ireland, are no 
less just than obligatory and ancient. 

Farmer: Verily, you must be severely driven for sound 
arguments, when you descend from the blest Melchisedech 
to the fabled Hercules, to prove that Irish Catholics are 
bound by all laws, both human and divine, to support all 
the ministers of the Established Church. Because one 
Mr. Virgil describes a certain sheep-stealer by the name of 
Cacus, to have inhabited a subterranean cave on the sum¬ 
mit of Mount Aventine, into which he was accustomed to 
drag, surreptitiously, his neighbours’ cattle backwards by 
the tail; and because, in a regular boxing-match, this noto¬ 
rious felon was vanquished by another bully of superior 
strength, named Hercules, to whom he was forced by the 
pressing laws of necessity to deliver up all his stolen cattle 
and plundered money; one-tenth of which the victor is said 
to have spent at a drunken frolic with Evander and his 
other pugilistic companions, which by the by, is no more 
than our modern jovial ring-fighters do : hence it follows, 
that the poor old Irish farmer, who never saw Mount Aven¬ 
tine in his life, and who never encased his two hands in a 
pair of gauntlets, must deliver up the tenth part of all his 
possessions to the prowling proctor, that the ministers of 
the Established Church, may fatten and grow pious on the 
poor man’s labour. This is surely what old lawyers call 
choping logic. Had you but emerged a little deeper into the 
merits of the heathen mythology, and told us that Apollo 
himself, in consequence of the large amount of tithes which 
he annually received from the inhabitants of the moon, was 
called Dekatephoras, or tithe-crowned; and that Juno, the 
beloved of Jupiter and Q,ueen of heaven, bestowed one-ten.th 


29 


of her possessions to the priests of Cibele, for the celestial 
knowledge they displayed in teaching Mars to dance a dead 
man's hornpipe, you would have strengthened your claim 
more to the widow’s shilling in Ireland than by all other 
classical quotations you can possibly remember. Indeed, 

I had every reason to believe, from what you parsons ad¬ 
vance on other occasions, that the city of seven hills would 
be your very last retreat, and the examples of her “ idola¬ 
trous sons” the last imitated by the devout ministers of the 
Church of England. But pray, reverend sir, can you find 
anything nearer home, to prove more thoroughly the par¬ 
son’s right to the Irish'tithes ? I maintain that, conceal it 
as you may, tithes and all species of taxation, are not so 
much the product of Religion, as the baneful offspring of 
despotic power, cupidity, and brutal force. 

Parson. Well, since you disregard, and endeavor to 
bring into contempt, the proofs I have already adduced, 
both from the inspired volume and ancient history, which 
to any other man could not fail to prove the solid founda¬ 
tion on which the tithe-system is founded ; I now refer you 
to those which come more immediately before our notice, 
and may be found recorded, with pride, in the history of 
England. Against these reasons, I venture to say, it is folly 
for any man to expostulate. At no later period than the 
fourth century, when vice was not so prevalent as it is now, 
tithes were paid without a murmur, for the support of the 
Church. And in the year of our Lord, 753, we find that 
Offa, king of Mercia, enacted a statute, by which tithes 
were established by civil law in England. To show that 
he did this, from a perfect conviction that tithes were bene¬ 
ficial to the soul, he consigned the one-tenth of all he 
owned under heaven, to the clergy, for the repairing of 
churches throughout the kingdom. He afterwards wrote 
a treatise, in which he positively declares, that he never 
found any thing so soothing to man’s soul, as the willing 
offering of tithes. In this he was followed by another 
exemplary Prince, named Ethel wolf, who not only made 
a free gift of the tenth of what he owned himself, but the 
same proportion of the whole kingdom. These two pew- 


30 


erful patrons' of the Church, have piously redeemed their 
souls, by a large sacrifice of property, thereby endearing 
their memory to the religious of every age. These are no 
fabulous tithe-payers, but the Christian kings of a land 
which every true Englishman is proud to acknowledge as 
his birth-place. What Offa did, and Ethelwolf approved, 
cannot be wrong. But why do I continue to waste lan¬ 
guage ! Had there been no argument under the canopy of 
heaven, to prove the sanctity of tithes, the just laws of 
armipotent England say they must be paid. Who dare 
oppose her salutary decrees 1 

Farmer. Ah ! now indeed, you come nearer the origin 
of tithes, than by any of your previous arguments. You 
have traced it from sacred to profane, from ancient to 
modern history, and I am rejoiced that you agree with me 
in leaving England the mother of all tithes and unlawful 
taxation. Offa and Ethelwolf were the first two kings, 
in England, that paid tithes to the Church, and these 
were voluntary, like the gift of Abraham, and the supper 
of Hercules. As you mentioned the name$ of these liberal 
church patrons, it is but just that their offences, and mo¬ 
tives, should be linked to their liberality. No crime was 
reckoned more heinous or unpardonable, among the old 
Irish, than a breach of hospitality, or inhospitable treat¬ 
ment to any guest, that sought protection in their mansions. 
Nor was Ireland the only land, in which gifts were offered 
on the' altar of hospitality. The very Africans w T ere sen¬ 
sible of the kind reception a stranger should receive, as is 
obvious from the kind manner in which Queen Dido re¬ 
ceived the ship-wrecked Trojans, who in their want, sought 
and found hospitality at her palace. Now, if it be proven 
that this tithe-instituting Offa, of England, added to the 
vilest offence of the ancients, the blackest crime in the 
catalogue of mortal sins, I think it will be doing something 
like proving that tithes, instead of claiming parentage from 
the patriarchs, and holy priests of Canaan, may find their 
birth from one of the most blood-stained tyrants that, sul¬ 
lied the throne of England. Such was the bounteous king 
Offa, who made a willing oblation of all he owned, that 


31 


his soul might he tranquilized, and cleansed from the blood 
of the murdered Ethelbert. Then, your whole right of 
plundering the enslaved and wretched peasantry of Ireland, 
rests “ in toto’’ on the simple historical account, that Ethel¬ 
bert, a young love-sick prince, was enamored of the fair 
daughter of Offa, king of Mercia, and paid a visit to her 
father’s palace, who in cold blood murdered him, in the 
presence of his sweet-heart, and the household gods. This 
remorseless murderer, being haunted day and night by Tis- 
iphone, and the other furies, could find no rest until he ex- i 
piated the two-fold crime, by consigning to the Church of 
God, one tenth of what he owned, after which his soul 
reposed placid as a mirror lake, when the winds go down 
to slumber with the setting sun. Next to him in devotion 
is Ethel wolf, who upon being threatened with an invasion 
of the Danes, believing that propitious Heaven might avert 
the calamity, he too, made a compliment to the Church of 
the tenth part of the whole kingdom ; and thus the one re¬ 
commends tithes to posterity, as the best cure for a guilty 
conscience,—the other for deep-rooted cowardice. But it 
would be lost time to argue with commissioned parsons, 
the merits or demerits of the tithe-system. Suffice it to 
say, that they originated in blood, and must one day be 
drowned in a copious effusion of the same purple tide. So 
long as Ireland is a slave, so long may the proctor starve 
the orphan, to feed religion. 

Ludicrous as such a dialogue may seem to a freeman, it 
embodies the strongest arguments that can possibly be 
wielded by the parson, in justification of his grasping ava¬ 
riciously the tenth part of the product of the poor man’s 
industry. On the free offering of Abraham, the nocturnal 
tippling of Hercules, the guilty conscience of Offa, and the 
effeminate cowardice of Ethelwolf, rests the towering 
Glebe, that sanctified receptacle of the first fruits of all 
Ireland, and the last sixpence of the desolate widow. Day 
after day may be seen the driver, the lowest link in the 
chain of humanity, forcing away the farmers’ cattle, and 
consigning them to dhe mercy of a pound-keeper, who in 
his turn is generally paid a handsome salary for starving 


32 


the cattle, and reducing them to the lowest stage of de¬ 
composition, that they may be valued for little or nothing, 
on the day of general auction. Had the cattle been fed, 
during the time they are advertised for sale, they might 
liquidate the owners debt, without any material sacrifice; 
but it not unfrequently happens that a cow, worth ten 
pounds when seized by the driver, is so starved in^a cold, 
muddy pound, that the parson sends his buyer, who, when 
there is no bidder, strikes her off at something like two 
pounds, By one month’s pasture on his luxurious mead¬ 
ows, the parson enhances her value once more to the origi¬ 
nal sum, adds her to his hundred stall-fed cattle, and ejects 
the owner, to linger or to die. This is one of the most 
flagitious, and I will add rascally means, by which the poor 
cottier is reduced to penury, and forced from his country; 
his friends and his home. The pound-keeper, like a terres- 
tial Cerberus, keeps continually barking, so that to stop 
his mouth, the bribes given from time to time, would more 
than doubly pay the amount for which the cattle are em- 
pounded. That this is true, appears from the following- 
extracts from a book, written some time ago, by a learned 
gentleman, entitled Practical views and suggestions of Irish 
affairs. In describing the sweeping excursions of the 
tithe-officers, he thus writes:— 

“ It seldom occurs that the parish officer is not on the 
walk, collecting what is called the parish cess. He is to 
be met with every day, driving some poor man’s cow to 
the pound, to enforce the payment of his charge, which is 
assessed by the acre. The poor peasantry are, as usual, 
the principal victims, as the cess is levied from the occu¬ 
pants exclusively.” In describing the wretchedness of the 
pounds, into which the cattle are driven, he says:— 

“ There is no public establishment so much used inlreland 
as the pound ; and the fees paid to the bailiffs in charge of 
these, for indulgences, or duties arbitrarily imposed, are 
comparatively considerable. In consequence of ill treat- 
nnent in these places of confinement, it happens not only 
generally, but almost universally, that the cattle are much 
injured, often depreciated a third, or more in value whereby 


33 


the poor peasant is made a serious sufferer.” To these I 
subjoin two other extracts from the great Milton’s works 
on tithes. It is very evident that life learned author’s 
opinion of these reverend collectors is rather slender, and 
that he believes them to be men more designed to hoard 
up mammon, than preach the word of God :—“I omit their 
violent and irreligious exactions, their seizing of pots and 
pans from the poor, who have as good a right to tithes as 
they, from some the very beds; and seizing and imprisoning 
worse than when the canon law was in force; worse than 
when the wicked sons of Eli were priests. For those 
sons of Balial, within some limits, made seizure of what 
they knew was their own, by an undoubted law; but 
these, from whom there is no sanctuary, seize out of mens’ 
grounds, out of mens’ houses, their other goods, of double, 
sometimes of treble value, for that which did not covetous¬ 
ness and rapine blind them, they know to be not their 
own, by the gospel which they preach.” Hear his opinion 
of these vile exactions:—“ Forced consecrations out of 
another man’s estate, are no better than forced vows— 
hateful to God, who loves a cheerful giver; but much 
more hateful, wrung out of mens’ purses, to maintain a 
disapproved ministry against their conscience, however 
unholy, infamous and dishonorable to his ministry and the 
free gospel, maintained in such unworthy manner, by vio¬ 
lence and extortion.” But the English parson, on Irish 
soil, is externally a gentleman. 

“ The robe that wraps his limbs in silken sloth, 

Has robb’d the neighboring fields of half their growth. ■’ 

Perhaps I could not better conclude this delicate subject 
of Church of England taxation, than by leaving the reader 
to meditate on the above extracts. If he is an Irishman, 
he has been an eye-witness, a thousand times, to the scenes 
already described. If an impartial Englishman, candor 
will force him to agree with his illustrious countryman 
above quoted, and declare, in public and private, that it 
can be neither honest, religious, nor honorable, to tax the 
poor Catholics of Ireland, to support a Church, alike for¬ 
eign to their creed and country. And should he be an 


34 


American, round whose heart the free blood of Washing¬ 
ton circulates, I know he would sooner drink the very 
essence of hemlock, than be plundered by proctors, or for¬ 
ced to drink the best teas imported by England, should 
they but be subject, by tyrants, to one farthing's taxation. 
Reader, £k 'do unto others as you would that they should do 
unto you ” If you would prefer suffering if possible, a 
thousand deaths, rather than be bound by the tyranny of 
man to maintain unwillingly, the Catholic Church, or any 
other establishment, in the heart of your country; blame 
not the enslaved Irish Catholic for seeking an asylum for 
his children, under the stripes and stars of republican 
liberty. This is charity, honor, and Christian benevolence. 
To leave man to his own free will,—to leave religion a 
subject between him and his Creator, and to leave every 
religious denomination to stand by its own resources, 
would prove both beneficial to man, and pleasing to God. 
That the Irish people have been denied these blessings at 
home—that they are insulted, down-trodden, plundered, 
and subject alike to civil and religious persecution—that 
they are sensible of their sufferings, indignant at slavery, 
and a liberty-loving people, impart sufficient information 
to any American who may hereafter ask—“ what brings 
so many Irish to America I” 

“ But admitting that the Irishman is pressed down with 
insufferable thraldom at home, what right has he to visit 
our free shores! What right has he to intrude on our 
country, narrow enough for ourselves, and snatch the bread 
from the hands of the native born ? Are they not the very 
off-scouring of Europe—the basest scum of society, and 
the beggarly inmates of the British penitentiaries, that an¬ 
nually line our coasts, and contaminate our countrymen 
with their noxious habits ! Ought we not, as true repub¬ 
licans, indemnify the liberty of our beloved country, and 
establish it on a firmer foundation, by laying a high tariff 
on the heads of all foreigners, and prolonging the naturaliza¬ 
tion laws to twenty-one years ! Has not the Father of his 
country, George Washington, in his second presidential 
message to Congress, warned us against foreign influence, 


35 


and surely it is evident to the most ignorant politician in 
the land, that the whole drift of his counsel tvas directed 
against the ignorant Irish!” These, with a thousand 
other groundless interrogatories, and nonsensical evapora¬ 
tions, are asked by the pretended American Republican 
party, in their zeal to fortify and perpetuate unstained, the 
liberty for which their fathers fought and bled. The first 
proposed, with all succeeding, is clearly solved by the first 
sentence in that heavenly document, the Declaration of In¬ 
dependence, where, as if inscribed by the finger of the Di¬ 
vinity, it flashed conviction even on the tyrant brow of 
George the third, in these words : “ We hold these truths 
to be self-evident, that all mankind are created equal; that 
they are endowed by their Creator with certain inaliena¬ 
ble rights ; that among these are life, liberty, and the pur¬ 
suit of happines.” 

It is worthy the attention of men, that the committee 
appointed by the colonists to draft this declaration of the 
great revolutionary fathers, consisted of five men, whose 
names were eulogised, not only in America, but through¬ 
out Europe, for learning, patriotism and wisdom. Jeffer¬ 
son, Adams, Franklin, Sherman, and Livingston, the five 
brightest stars in the constellation of liberty, shed a reful¬ 
gence on the new world, that, like the pillar of fire, or the 
star that guided the eastern sages, illumines the pathway 
of the oppressed exile, from the Egypt of fetters, to u the 
Republic of freedom—the sanctuary of all persecuted.” 
11 All men are created equal” So said Jefferson; and upon 
his copy of the declaration being read, he who bottled the 
lightnings of Heaven, and incarcerated them in his pocket, 
exhibited not the product of his own philosophic mind, but 
declared that Jefferson’s writing was the suggestion of 
Heaven, and would live coeval to the magnanimity of man. 
Washington confirmed the opinion of Franklin, and thus 
was transmitted to posterity the best specimen of Christian 
composition ever written by the pen of man. The whole 
world admire it, and view it as the pure emanation of a 
mind free and unprejudiced as the angels that surround 
the throne of God. Sixty-eight years has it been wor- 


36 


shipped in the temple of liberty, and men from all climes 
pronounced it the noblest work of the noblest men. 
But within the last two years a defect is discovered, which 
escaped the wisdom of Washington , the philosophy of 
Franklin , and the democracy of Jefferson. A flaw is found 
out. By whom ? By some learned master-spirit of the 
age ? By some time-honored hero, whose brows are 
decked with the laurels of his country’s victory ? No, 
gentle reader ; but by the church-burning rowdies of Phil¬ 
adelphia, and the beardless fanatics of New York. They 
have discovered more than the foreigner Columbus, that 
discovered America, and laid it open to the world. But 
do you ask what is this great development of the human 
mind, that in the nineteenth century flashes its corrusca- 
tions round the butchers’ stalls, and gambling porterhouses 
of these two cities ? Oh ! it is that Washington , and 
Franklin , and Jefferson , and Sherman , and Livingston , 
aad Charles Thomson , and Charles Carrol , and all the 
members of the Continental Congress, were more ignorant 
than mankind imagine, when they approved of, and signed 
the declaration of American independence. Who can 
prove them so ? Why, there are George Shidler, Lewis 
Grible, and Joseph Cox, of Philadelphia, and John Drake, 
William Duck, and Simon Gander, of New York, and an 
infinite number of other talented young gentlemen, who 
are prepared to prove, both in public and private, that it is 
a base, grovelling assertion, unbecoming a true native 
American, to say that all mankind are created equal, and 
should be entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of hap¬ 
piness. 

“ What! Irishmen entitled to liberty ? What have they 
done to entitle them to any thing? Why, every good 
American ought to put his shoulder to the wheel, and 
blast them from the earth, rather than leave them either 
life, liberty, or happiness, while crowding us from our 
homes, and defeating us at the ballot-box. Washington 
is famed for freeing our land, and others for drafting our 
constitution; but we maintain that their names would be 
more revered by mankind, particularly by every “Native 


American/' had they pronounced it penal for the most per¬ 
secuted foreigner to land on our shores. At any rate, the 
days of grace designed by these men are passed. It is now 
high time that we proscribe all men not born within the 
limits of the United States. As the first step towards the 
accomplishment of this, our purpose, we elected his honor 
Mayor Harper , last spring, which serves as a good foun¬ 
dation for indiscriminate proscription. To work, Natives! 
We shall rend the old constitution as Samson rent the 
lion—patch up anew one of our own, that will answer our 
views in every respect; enact our own laws ; keep all the 
offices, or flesh-pots, to ourselues ; make foreigners slaves 
twenty-one years, or drive them back to the pitch-caps, 
gibbets, triangles, and racks of the tyranny they abandoned. 
We will even do more than all this, if we elect Harper 
a second time, next spring.’ 7 

That this is the true spirit of the misnamed Native Par¬ 
ty, no intelligent American will deny. The Irishman is 
branded, and singled out as the object of all their fury. At 
him alone is levelled the great pop-gun of their ill-founded 
spleen, charged by Mr. Quackenboss with something heav¬ 
ier than snipe-shot. Had all Americans been “Natives” 
there could have been no salvation for the Irishman ; but 
to their eternal honour be it said, he finds every true Amer¬ 
ican a true friend. Could his vote be only purchased by 
the “ men of Hartford,” he would then be deemed a useful 
citizen, an honest man; but thank heaven, there are very 
few Irishmen so ignorant as to rivet the chains in America, 
that bound them so long in Ireland. 

They may spout their rancorous spleen through the ly ing 
columns of their sullied penny sheets, hut the Irishman can 
stand in the presence of nineteen millions and challenge 
them to record the name of a foreigner that ever raised his 
right hand to strike a single blow against the liberty of his 
adopted country. 

The “Native,” standing in the centre of jive millions one 
hundred thousand square acres of free land, says to the 
poor exile cast on his shore by the raging waves of the At¬ 
lantic : “ See here, foreigner! what the d—1 brougnt you 


38 


here? Pick yourself up quick as a lightning flash, and 
steer your passage home again. This country is too limited 
for myself, without the intrusion of all the outcasts from all 
Europe. The time is mingled with the past, when such 
as you might find protection under the banner of freedom: 
another race is now sprung up, who are determined to ben¬ 
efit by their Fathers’ foolishness, and keep all America to 
themselves. If you were wise enough to come over and be 
born here, you might participate in our blessings ; but since 
you had chosen another country for your birth-place, go 
back speedily as possible, and smart forever under the 
kingly misrule of the old world.” 

But, says the foreigner, what matters it where a man is 
born, provided he is a good man? Rest assured, friend, 
that during the nine months I lived in my mother’s womb, 
I was not statesman sufficiently learned to look so far into 
futurity as to advise my mother to have me born in Amer¬ 
ica, that I might enjoy the blessings and inherit the birth¬ 
right of a free land. I know not how wise and learned 
American babies generally are, when introduced into the 
world; but believe me, an Irish child even a month old, is 
unable to take care of itself. It was not before I grew into 
my “ teens,” that I understood I was born in the wrong 
place. The only way then left by which I could better 
my condition, was to accept the liberal invitation of the 
learned American statesmen, who declared that, in com¬ 
mon with mankind, I was entitled to the 11 pursuit of hap¬ 
piness.” I never dreamed there were such bigots as you 
in America, as in all parts of the world it is emphatically 
styled : 

“ The land of the free, and the home of the brave !” 

Now, sir, it seems to me that birth-place neither qualifies 
nor disqualifies any man. I thought all the Earth was 
made by the same over-ruling power, and that, save the 
Garden of Eden, it was all alike—made out of nothing. 
As there was no difference in the material from which it 
was formed, there can be no difference in the inhabitants. 
Our divine Saviour was born in a stable; yet he was the 
God of Nature, more powerful than any emperor born in 


39 


the palace of the Caesars. Could it make man more perfect 
to be born in America, than in any other corner of the 
world, it appears very strange that the exterminating angel 
did not conduct Adam and Eve from the gate of Paradise 
to Cape Cod, and there ordain for the benefit of mankind, 
that all their children should be born “Natives.” But it was 
not previous to 1492, that the old cursed Catholic foreigner 
Columbus (for cursed he must be, as he was a Catholic) 
found it in the peaceable possession of Natives whose com¬ 
plexion and clemency differ materially from that of all our 
“ modern Natives.” 

The procrastination of the discovery to such a late peri¬ 
od, mankind regard as the wisdom of the all-seeing Deity, 
who left it an unknown resting place, until the whole world 
was over-run with the tyranny of wicked and oppressive 
men. In 1620, the Pilgrims from England, or foreigners 
forced then by the same oppression that I so fortunately 
escaped in 1844, landed in a cold December, on the rocks 
of Plymouth, and were greeted by the forest savages with 
language somewhat milder and far more merciful than that 
which thunders in my ears from a Christian “ Native ” of 
the nineteenth century. Those all Americans call fathers, 
but if all Americans are “Natives,” I leave yourself to judge 
the degenerated morals of their proscribing children. They, 
up to that blest epoch 1776, stretched out the right hand 
of fellowship and brotherly love to the friendless exile, and 
bade him a thousand welcomes from he persecution of old 
England. Had they been such “ Natives” as the followers 
of Quackenboss, we could have no American independence, 
as George Washington' 1 s grand-father was an Englishman, 
too noble-minded to stoop to the slavery of twenty-one 
years, and consequently the American Cincinnatus could 
never have been a Native of Virginia, or the great instru¬ 
ment in the hand of Heaven, to emancipate nineteen mil¬ 
lions. Had these nineteen millions, made free by Wash¬ 
ington, but been enveloped in a dense cloud of superstition 
like the heathen Romans, and believed that the gods were 
their sires, that they were too celestial to be descended ol 
foreigners; and that they established their independence 


40 


without mortal aid, no man could then blame them to lock 
up their liberty, keep all offices to themselves, and say to 
the weary exile —“Go thy way, I know thee notT But the 
American historian faithful to his trust, has written in in- 
dellible characters on the hearts of Americans, that men of 
all climes , and of all creeds , battled under Washington, until 
liberty was gained, when the tyrant fell at Yorktown. 
He blushed not to write, that three commissioners, Dr. 
Franklin, Silas Deane, and Arthur Lee, were sent by Con¬ 
gress to France, in 1777, to solicit foreign assistance, and 
that the philosopher , with honorable candor, confessed, that 
so destitute of funds were the Americans, after the disas¬ 
ters which preceded the battle at Trenton, that they were 
unable to provide for the passage of the young Marquis de 
La Fayette across the ocean. 

“ If your country,” replied the gallant foreigner, “is in¬ 
deed reduced to this extremity, it is at this moment that 
my departure to join her armies will render her the most 
essential service.” Shade of a Washington ! dost thou will 
that the children of such foreigners should be vassals in a 
land, where their fathers’ blood, at thy very side, paid the 
ransom of their liberty # Oh! Washington would blush at 
the ingratitude of such a “native”: 

“ When ingratitude, 

That sin of cowards, once takes root, a thousand 
Base grov’ling crimes cling round its monst’rous growth, 

Like ivy to old oaks, to hide its rottenness.” 

And was he the only fareigner that stood by Washing¬ 
ton in the darkest days of his seven years’ struggle# An¬ 
swer history! thou faithful, thou impartial recorder of he¬ 
roic achievements ! Exhibit in emblazoned letters, to the 
bigots’ sight, the names of those who shed a blaze of reful¬ 
gence on the escutcheon of America, too dazzling to be 
darkened by the gloom of intolerance, too glorious to be 
forgotten while freedom finds worshippers—while time 
continues his long rounds of duration. 

Ah! History speaks!! The name of a DeKalb, the 
brave, the patriotic Dutchman , falls from her lips ! Hear 
her, thou selfish “Native”’ thou who deemest the Earth 


41 


too narrow for thy foot-pace, and the Heavens too low for 
thy sordid expectations ! She tells thee that the foreigner 
DeKalb pierced with his sword the kingly palladium, when 
Charlestown blazed by the torch of the tyrant, when free 
wives and fair daughters were branded as slaves. Aye ! 
and where was Kosiusco, th e pride, the bulwark , of subju¬ 
gated Poland ? Did he not crimson his blade in the heart’s 
blood of lordlings, and raise liberty’s banner to float on the 
breeze ? Albeit he was a foreigner, his arm was powerful, 
and Washington bore witness, he struck as a warrior , a 
warriors blow. But what of insulted Ireland ! Was she in 
’76, as in ’44, “ the land of cowardly Irishmen V’ Was she 
as a “ Native” of Piermont, Rockland county, calls her, the 
“ home of brutes, too ignorant to be free, but fit to live in 
chains ?” Are the words of the Hartford tory credible, or 
wilt thou, History, stamp the lie on this barefaced slanderer, 
whose mother dipped him Achilles-like to the vfery heel in 
the pool of scandal, and taught his three-forked tongue to 
lisp in obloquy, prejudice, and falsehoods ? Answer impar¬ 
tially, that mankind may judge, whether Irishmen, and 
Irishmens’ sons, were slumbering, while Americans were 
combatting to obtain their independence. 

Who was Charles Carroll of Carrollton, and what ser¬ 
vice rendered he to his country ? History : He was the 
grandson of an Irishman, a Catholic by Religion. He not 
only signed his name to the Declaration of Independence, 
but the very place of his habitation, where the tyrant might 
find him, should he dare pay him a visit. 

Who was Charles Thomson, or lived there such a man 
in the days of the Revolution ? History : Charles Thom¬ 
son, confidential secretary to the Continental Congress, 
who was appointed the delegate to announce to General 
George Washington, then like the Roman Cincinnatus, en¬ 
joying his rural felicity, that he was the unanimous choice 
of a free people, to be first President of the land he made 
free, was an Irishman, born in Ireland in 1730, and was 
eleven years old when he emigrated to Pennsylvania. Al¬ 
though, in the “Native’s” language “ a brute,” both by birth 
and nature, the fathers of this great Republic, during fifteen 

6 


42 


years, confided to him the very secrets of their souls, until 
at the expiration of that time, directed by the instinct of 
an u Irish brute,” he resigned his honorable office, and 
never turned Arnold to liis country. I would judge the 
fathers that invested in him this large amount of confidence, 
almost as patriotic as the abject “ Native” of Rockland 
county. “ Te judice.” 

Who was General George Clinton, President of the State 
convention which met to deliberate on the present consti¬ 
tution of the Union, and who was five times elected gov¬ 
ernor of his native State 1 History : He was the son of an 
Irishman, was born in Ulster county, July 26, 1739, and 
died at Washington, April 20,1812. Though a half brute 
by the contemptible “ Native’s” language, he bravely de¬ 
fended Fort Montgomery with a small band of warm-hearted 
Americans, against the superior forces of British adversa¬ 
ries. 

Who was George Bryan, governor of Pennsylvania, who 
in 1765 so powerfully declaimed against the wanton aggres¬ 
sions of the British rulers; who was elected Vice President 
of the Supreme Executive Council of Pennsylvania, and 
who afterwards forced his way through columns of red¬ 
coats, iu his march to the templo of liberty! History: He 
was an Irishman by birth, bom in the city of Dublin, an 
avowed enemy to George III,—a warm,unvacillating friend 
to the Continental Congress. He served his adopted coun¬ 
try as a faithful servant, and in 1791 took his passage for 
eternity, as all “brutes” must. 

Who was Major General Anthony Wayne, so distin¬ 
guished in the wars of his country, and so esteemed by the 
founders of liberty 1 History : He was an Irishman’s son. 
In 1775 he raised a regiment of volunteers to devote their 
lives to their country’s cause, and oppose the power of the 
Saxon tyrant. By the concurring voice of freemen, he was 
elected their Colonel, had a commission from Congress in 
1776, commanded a division of the army at the battle of 
Brandywine, and proved himself “a half brute” worthy the 
applause of freemen. In 1775, he accompanied General 
Thomson into Canada, where he entered his claim for the 


43 


name hero, by offering a libation of his blood to the genius 
of liberty. In 1776, he served under General Gates at Ti- 
conderoga, and received the cordial thanks and warmest 
approbation of his skilful commander. He was presented 
with a gold medal and a fruitful farm, by Congress, as a 
token of sincere gratitude and felt acknowledgment, for the 
essential services he bestowed their struggling country. 
When he thought he received a mortal wound, as he made 
an attack on Stony Point, in July, 1769, his only request 
was, that his soldiers should carry him within the works 
which he so bravely defended. This brave Irishman’s son 
died in 1796, and was interred on the margin of Lake Erie; 
but in October, 1809, removed to Rodner Church, Chester 
county, Pennsylvania. Sliould it so happen that the “Na¬ 
tive of Rockland county” at any future time pass that way, 
it will open the eyes of a child of the tory convention to 
see the towering monument that perpetuates to posterity 
the appreciated virtues of “half an Irish brutel 

Who was George Taylor, delegated by Pennsylvania to 
swell the number of conscript fathers assembled at Phila¬ 
delphia to denounce the tyranny of the old world, and 
build up a Republic in which man might stand erect, the 
image of his God 1 History: He was born in Ireland in 
1716. Poor as Benjamin Franklin, he landed at Philadel¬ 
phia ; but unlike the tory “ Native,” were the illustrious 
founders of the commonwealth, as they never, in all their 
writings, deemed poverty a crime. He signed his name to 
the eternal document, and the name of George Taylor 
sounded as powerful before the blood-stained throne of 
England, and was read with as much delight by the Father 
of his country, George Washington, as though he were 
no Irishman. Having rendered his name immortal among 
the fifty-six signers, he died at Easton, February 22, 1781, 
and was buried with all the honours of what the “ Native” 
calls an “ Irish brute.” 

Who was Colonel James Smith, a lawyer by profession, 
a member of the Revolutionary Congress, a Colonel in its 
armies, one of the fifty-six signers of the Declaration of Inde¬ 
pendence, and one of the most strenuous supporters 


44 


Republic 7 History: He was born in Ireland, came to 
America with his father, who settled on the banks of the 
Susquehanna. He it was who organized the first company 
of volunteers in Pennsylvania, who were the nucleus of 
that band of devoted heroes, known to the world as the 
Pennsylvania line. These were 20,000 in number, mostly 
Irishmen, and Irishmens 5 , sons, and the majority of them 
Catholics, banished by the misrule of English tories; 
but they showed no disposition to betray the country, 
or deliver it into the hands of the king of England, or 
the “ Pope of Rome. 55 They knew they never could have 
a better opportunity to strike for the accumulated wrongs 
of poor Ireland, than by fighting bravely for the liberty 
of the Western world. On the 2d of March, 1781, 
they refused to fight, unless Congress would redress 
their wants, by affording them food and clothing. Lord 
Howe, like the “ upstart Natives 51 of 5 44, ignorant of the 
fidelity of Irishmen in a sacred cause, sent agents laden 
with gold and purple garments, to seduce them from their 
duty; but they, by the patriotism of foreigners, like An¬ 
drew at Tappen, died a death more lofty than honorable. 
Wonder what the chicken-hearted “ Native 55 would think, 
had he seen the “ Irish brutes 55 delivering up the Saxon 
spies, to die for their deeds of villainy!! 

Who was Colonel Isaac Barre, a member of the English 
House of Parliament, when the courtiers of a despot under¬ 
took to subject the Colonists to a species of taxation, only 
equaled in the annals of Nations by that already described, 
which enslaves nine millions in their own once-happy 
home? History: He was the son of very poor Irish pa¬ 
rents, and was born in Dublin, in 1726. At an early 
period in life, he thirsted for military honors, and chose the 
army for his profession. 

Had he lived in the days of our patriotic “ Natives, 55 they 
would doubtless deem it an act of charity to stone him to 
death, rather than let such a poor Irishman breathe the 
vital air of Heaven ; but, bad as are the laws of England, 
he was permitted to live, until in 1761 he was elected 
member of Parliament, and proved himself a useful mem- 


45 


ber to the American Colonists. During his session in 
Parliament, the British Ministers introduced several de¬ 
moralizing acts, calculated to enslave and rob the Ameri¬ 
cans, among which were two, by which duties would be 
imposed on teas and stamp-paper ; that is to say, no love- 
letter could be binding to a young lover, or cup of tea 
sweet to the palate of an elderly lady, unless two pence be 
paid to his Majesty George III, for stamping his head on 
the one, and breathing his will on the other. It would be 
a work of supererrogation, to offer a single remark on the 
impossibility of his Majesty to subsidize men so noble; as 
the most superficial reader is aware, that love-letters still 
go for the postage, and that, instead of the old ladies, the 
fishes at Boston harbor enjoyed the delicate flavor of the 
Saxon teas. When the bill was laid before Parliament in 
1765, an Englishman was its advocate,—an Irishman its 
most strenuous opposer. At the conclusion of an anima¬ 
ted speech, delivered by the Englishman, Charles Towns- 
hend, he demanded :—“ And these Americans, children 
planted by our care, nourished by our indulgence, protec¬ 
ted by our arms, until they are grown to a good degree of 
strength and opulence, will they grudge to contribute their 
mite to relieve us from the heavy load of National expense 
which we lie under V 1 Colonel Barre, the Irishman , im¬ 
mediately rising, indignantly and eloquently exclaimed :— 
“ Children planted by your care ? No ! your oppression 
planted them in America. They fled from your tyranny, 
into a then uncultivated land, where they were exposed to 
all the hardships to which human nature is liable; and 
among others, to the cruelties of a savage foe, the most 
subtle, and I will take upon me to say the most terrible 
that ever inhabited any part of God’s earth. And yet, 
actuated by principles of true English liberty, they met all 
these hardships with pleasure, when they compared them 
with those they suffered in their own country, from men 
who should have been their friends. 

“ They nourished by your indulgence !” No ! they grew 
by your neglect. When you began to care about them, 
that care was exercised in sending persons to rule over 


46 


them, who were the deputies of some deputy, sent to spy 
out their liberty, to misrepresent their actions, and to prey 
upon them : whose behavior on many occasions, has caused 
the blood of those sons of liberty to recoil within them; 
men promoted to the highest seats of justice, some of 
whom were glad, by going to a foreign country, to escape 
being brought to the bar of justice in their own. 

11 They protected by your arms /” They have nobly taken 
up arms in your defence. They have exerted their valor, 
amidst their constant and laborious industry, for the de¬ 
fence of a country, which, while its frontier was drenched 
in blood, has yielded all its little savings to your emolu¬ 
ment. Believe me, and remember I this day told you so, 
the same spirit which actuated that people at first, still 
continues with them, but prudence forbids me to explain 
myself further. 

“ God knows I do not at this time speak from party 
heat. However superior to me in general knowledge and 
experience any one here may be, I claim to know more of 
America, having been conversant in that country. The 
people there are as truly loyal as any subjects the king has, 
but they are a people jealous of their liberties, and will vin¬ 
dicate them if they should be violated. But the subject is 
delicate ; I will say no more.” 

Queries to the Proscribing “Native? 1 

“ Which of these men, thinkest thou, was neighbor to 
him who fell among thieves V 1 Remember, the English¬ 
man expostulated that Americans should wear eternally 
the mortifying chains of kingly sway,—the Irishman, or 
“ brute” as thou wouldst name him, exhausted his lungs in 
support of Colonial liberty. Methinks, friend “ Native,” 
that hadst thou but heard him declaiming for the freedom 
of “ Natives,” thou wouldst, if possible, rest from thy habit¬ 
ual slander, and pronounce Colonel Barre at least a more 
eloquent “brute” than yourself, or Balaam’s Ass. 

Who was that soul-moving youth, Patrick Henry, who 
so nobly animated his countrymen to deeds of resistance 
when the clangour of British chains was borne in the 
northern breeze, and the blood of freemen was shed at 


47 


Concord, as the earliest seed of American liberty ? His¬ 
tory : He was an Irishman’s son, horn in Virginia, and was 
member of the General Assembly of that State, when the 
news arrived from Great Britain that the Colonies were 
taxed in England, without a solitary Representative from 
America in the British Parliament. The “ Native” him¬ 
self, opposed as he is to granting any honor to poor Ireland, 
must by necessity admit, that this brilliant and powerful 
young orator was born of Irish parents, from the convin¬ 
cing fact that the “Natives” would rather consign him to the 
waters of the Hudson, than condescend to name him Pat¬ 
rick. However, nothing degenerated by the name, he 
publicly denied the validity of the bill, as passed in Eng¬ 
land ; offered five resolutions in the House of Assembly, 
which all true republicans admit to be the five pedestals, 
upon which the temple of liberty is erected. He proved 
himself the prince of patriots, and American Demosthenes, 
who by his 

“ Resistless eloquence, 

Wielded at will the fierce democracy; 

Shook the Arsenal, and fulmined over Greece, 

To Macedon—and Artazerxes throne.” 

He it was who, clothed in the majesty of man, standing on 
the green earth as his heritage, with the azure vault of 
Heaven above him, exclaimed, in the very face of the 
Tyrant,— 

“ Give me liberty, or give me death.” 

Who was Robert Fulton, the ingenious fabricator of the 
first steam-boat ever launched on the waters of the world ? 
Had he any of this “foreign blood,” which clogs the energies 
of the soul, stupifies the brain, and so depreciates the 
whole human frame, that it appears as the corse of “a brute” 
in the estimation of our rowdy “ Natives '?” History : He 
was the son of a most impoverisheh Irish laborer. His 
father must be considered as a component part of what the 
church-burners denominate the offscouring of Europe. A 
needy exile, he sought refuge from the oppression of des¬ 
pots, and like the pilgrims ol the seventeenth century, 
found America a resting place from the buffeting tempests 


48 


of lordly persecution. Robert, the great benefactor of 
mankind, was born at Little Britain, Lancaster comity, 
Pennsylvania, A. D. 1765, and in 1786 took his passage for 
Europe, being then 21 years of age, commonly called by 
American youth the golden age of liberty. During his re¬ 
sidence in England, he stopped in the house of Benjamin 
West, the celebrated American painter. In 1794 he re¬ 
ceived several patents for his superior skill in landscape 
painting, ; —removed to Paris in 1796, and there studied the 
European languages. There, on the river Seine, he un¬ 
dertook the erection of the first steamboat ever propelled 
by fire and smoke, and was successful in his third attempt. 
In 1806 he returned to New York, built and navigated on 
the waters of the Hudson two steam-boats, of considera¬ 
ble dimensions, and lastly a frigate, which bore his own 
immortal name. To the acknowledged loss of the world, 
he died at New York, February 23, 1815, in the 44th year 
of his age. There is not a steamer that cleaves the surges 
of the mighty world of waters, but seems a moving monu¬ 
ment of his super-human wisdom, and imparts this salu¬ 
tary lesson to the near-sighted bigots of New York and 
Philadelphia:—“Before you undertake to restrict foreign . 
emigration, cancel from the archives of your National 
glory, the name of this poor Irishman’s son,—he who de¬ 
monstrated himself the master-spirit of the present age— 
the builder of your first and boasted steam-boats,—the 
sage, Heaven-inspired, never to be forgotten— Robert 
Fulton. 

Who was Brigadier General Montgomery, who w r as the 
favorite selection of George Washington, to command one 
of the two expeditions against Canada, and to raise to the 
breeze of Heaven the standard of liberty, in the common 
centre of the British dominions ? History : He w r as born 
in Ireland, was a young officer of the most resplendent 
talents, and heroic valor. He, and General Schuyler of 
New York, were the two commissioned by the Com- 
mander-in-Chief of the United States forces, to carry the 
war to the threshold of the tyrant, and Leonides-like, to 
deal out an unsparing sample of American bravery, under 


49 


the very fortifications of king-trodden (Quebec. So few 
were the “ Natives” in those days, and so imperfectly 
known was the hellish hydra, local prejudice, that the 
illustrious Colonel Allen, the hero of Ticonderoga, he 
whom the plundered gold of all England could not tempt, 
held a commission under that young Irishman, Richard 
Montgomery. 33' They were all Americans, and the best 
sort, that followed him through his brilliant victories.«j|p| 
When summoned by amor patriae to confront the death¬ 
dealing mouth of the British cannon, his last parting words 
to his young, amiable wife, were—“ You shall never hlush 
for your Montgomery.” His first irresistible attack was 
on “ St. Johns,” a neatlittle village on the river Sorel, where 
he appeared a foreigner, hostile to tyrants,—like so many 
hedge-sparrows, at the terrible appearance of a voracious 
hawk, they fled at his approach. He, to be avenged on the 
British for the capture of his dear companion, Colonel 
Allen, on the first of November commenced a heavy can¬ 
nonade of the enemy’s works, which was continued with¬ 
out intermission, during the whole day. At twilight, he 
sent out one of the British prisoners, whom he had in cus¬ 
tody, to demand the surrender of the fort in the name of 
the Continental Congress, which by the by, although he 
was one of the “ off-scouring” of Europe, was speedily 
complied with ; for by this time it was discovered that an 
Irishman’s shot found the way through many a red coat. 
Soon after the surrender of 11 St. Johns,” he appeared be¬ 
fore the walls of Montreal. His first proclamation on en¬ 
tering the city was, that the property, rights and religion 
of every individual should be respected. How unlike 
Cromwell at Drogheda, and the “Natives” in Philadel¬ 
phia, was this Christian manifesto of the meek and lion- 
hearted Montgomery ! On the first day of December he 
arrived at Quebec, where the soldiers of Arnold, debilita¬ 
ted by hunger, cold and nakedness, having, like Hannibal 
of old, traversed regions unmarked before by the foot-prints 
of civilized man, awaited impatiently their long expected 
deliverer. The acclamations of the sufferers rent the 
Heavens,—their hardships were ended—Montgomery had 

7 


/ 


50 


arrived. Clothing and provisions, of which he had ail 
abundant supply, soon resuscitated their drooping spirits— 
re-animated them to their wonted courage, and in the meet¬ 
ing of their friends and dear companions in arms, they soon 
forgot the biting frosts and dreary swamp- of the unbroken 
deserts of Maine. But often Empires crumble by a mo¬ 
ment’s destiny, and so fell the brave Montgomery, on the 
high-way to glory and liberty. His patriotic blood satu¬ 
rated the roots of freedom—his name is embalmed in the 
shrine of American gratitude—his heroic deeds are deeply 
inscribed on the hearts of freedom’s worshippers. He died, 
but his memory is immortal. Sooner shall the stars be 
blotted from Heaven’s concave, than Montgomery from the 
souls of freemen. As the deadly cannon proclaimed his 
doom, and as his eyes were swimming in the shades of 
eternity, knowing he was about to bid an everlasting fare¬ 
well to the land he loved next to Heaven, he expired in 
the dignity of a warrior, repeating the words of uncon¬ 
quered Cato— ■“ What a pity is it that we can serve our 
Country but once.” What “ Native” ever died a more 
glorious death !! In 1818, New York, his adopted State, 
removed his remains from Quebec to its metropolis—re¬ 
buried them under St. Paul’s-Church, Broadway—built a 
monument to this Irishman’s memory, bearing the follow¬ 
ing inscription —- l This monument is erected by order of 
Congress, 25th January, 1776, to transmit to posterity a 
grateful remembrance of the patriotism, conduct, enterprise 
and perseverance of Major General Richard Montgomery, 
who, after a series of successes, amidst the most discoura¬ 
ging difficulties, fell in the attack on Quebec, 31st Decem¬ 
ber, 1774, aged 37 years.” 

Who was the hero, of the Hermitage, whose giant arm 
defended American honor,—protected the fair ones of New 
Orleans,—crimsoned the mighty Mississippi with the blood 
of usurpers, and strewed their bones upon its banks, like 
shells upon the sea-shored History: Both his parents 
were born in Ireland. Like all other exiles, the lash of 
the lawless despot forced them from their home. Casting 
a fond look back on the last perceptible portion of his dear 


51 


; Erin, and bidding an unwilling adieu to that green, blest 
| land, “ where many a saint and many a hero trod,” theage- 
w T orn father implored Heaven that from his bones might 
arise an avenging warrior, who firmly believing in “ lex 
talionis ,” would one day pay back, in his own coin, and 
with compound interest, the enslaving tyrant that doomed 
him a mourning exile forever from his home. Need I say 
that Heaven heard his prayer? As a presage of his future 
greatness, his son, Andrew Jackson, was born on the very 
boundary of freedom. From his birth-place he took, as 
through a mirror, a retrospective view of the wrongs of 
ages; and growing, in herculean might, made a solemn 
■ vow to the God of Justice, that his father’s persecution, in¬ 
separable as his soul and body till death, would stick to his 
memory, till thousands of tyrants should fall by his hand. 
In 1815 his protestation was realized. The same op¬ 
pressor of his father’s land made war against the beautiful 
ladies of New Orleans. With brutality, becoming a Van¬ 
dal, a Goth, or an Ostrogoth, appeared Edward Packen- 
ham, the boast of England, who, confident of capturing one 
of the most opulent cities of America, regardless of religion 
and Christian deportment, as a stimulus to the hireling sol¬ 
diers, gave as a countersign—“ booty and beauty .” But 
little did the tyrant know, that the son of a poor Irish 
exile would be the slayer of the famed Packenham, who, 
under Wellington, reaped laurels of victory at the bloody 
carnage of Waterloo. Ah ! gladly would old England 
have remunerated the father of Jackson, to have stopped 
at home, had she but anticipated that he could ever have 
raised a son in the new world so warlike as “old hickory.” 
Jackson was too much an Irishman to desert the cause of 
the fair sex. The 8th of January manifested to the world 
a spirit for liberty, and “an Irishman’s heart for the ladies.” 
Then it was, that he raised his conquering sword, and 
struck for freedom, beauty, and vengeance. Then it was 
that he curbed for ever the insolence of the tyrant, and 
rescued from premeditated violation the devoted daughters 
of Columbia. The long wished for day of retribution ar¬ 
rived, when Jackson performed his vows, by the immola- 




52 


tion of 7000 on the altar of liberty, to appease the manes of 
his once insulted sire. A native of the old federal school, 
adverting to the victory of this brave old warrior, with un¬ 
blushing audacity dared pronounce him “ a profane old 
wretch” Well, if it be profanity to humble tyrannical 
England with cotton bags,—to slay thousands to defend 
American ladies,—and to raise the eagle of Washington to 
the stars of Heaven, may we know no creed but that of 
the unswerving, patriotic General, Andrew Jackson. 

“ Hail, mighty chief, thy foes must ever yield, 

Thou’rt great in counsel, mighty in the field ; 

The pride of Britain were, in martial bloom, 

By thee sent headlong to a bloody tomb.” 

That poor Ireland was not slumbering, during the seven 
years that tried the souls of heroes, is obviously authenti¬ 
cated by the unsullied pages of American history. That 
the records of fame are replete with the names of exiles 
and their sons, occupying, among Americans, the van in 
danger’s ranks, where— 

“ Fire to fire, flint to flint, and to outface 
The brow of bragging horror,—” 

They fought the battles of their adopted country, none but 
“Natives” can deny. Arnold was no Irishman! No 
church-burning “native” of Philadelphia, or vile slanderer 
of Rockland county, was more a “native” than he; yet his 
birth-place availed him very little, when he undertook to 
betray the liberty of his native country into the hands of a 
despot, and lkave posterity forever writhing in the chains of a 
foreign king. And should the same invidious foe a third time 
block up our harbours and sea-port cities, the true Ameri¬ 
can would find the greater number of Arnolds among our 
boisterous “ Natives.” These loud-mouthed demagogues, 
in whose wardrobes may yet be found the red-coats im¬ 
ported from Nova Scotia, would follow in the footsteps of 
their fathers—grasp the enslaver’s bribe, and a second time 
pitch their camp on the same old tory-neutral ground. 

As many such “natives” as would reach from here to the 
out-skirts of eternity, would not make one American like 
George Washington. “Washington’s name, says Napoleon, 


shall live in the hearts of his countrymen, when mine shall 
perish in the vortex of revolutions.” Is this the George 
Washington, that the “Natives” say so much, resembled 
themselves in his hatred to Irish Catholics Is he the 
identical Washington, who in his message to Congress, al¬ 
ready alluded to, commanded the sacrilegious “ Natives” of 
Philadelphia to beware of the Irish Catholic laborers, to 
raze to the dust the churches erected by the sweat of their 
brow, and force the emblem of the cross, upon which the 
Reedemer bled, to fall at the feet of “Natives”"? Yes, he 
is the same heaven-inspired Washington, beloved by the 
world, and only belied by his church-burning “Natives.” 
He never burned a church, he never broke a cross, he never 
demolished an altar, and he never robbed a sanctuary. Ap¬ 
pointed by Heaven to found a Republic, he laid the corner¬ 
stone on religious toleration, knowing by the history of 
crumbled kingdoms and empires, that human blood is the 
wrong cement for the temple of liberty. The portion of 
his message which relates to foreign influence, and which 
appears a huge bug-bear to the over-zealous “ Natives,” I 
cheerfully present to the world, that the poor Irish Catholic 
may see the tens of thousands of places, where Wash¬ 
ington designates him as the great rock in the ocean of pol¬ 
itics, against which the ship of state, under full sail, will 
be shattered into fragments. The following is a true copy, 
word for word, as penned by the father of his country. 

“ Observe good faith and justice towards all nations; 
cultivate peace and harmony with all. Religion and mor¬ 
ality enjoin this conduct; and can it be that good policy 
does not equally enjoin it"? It will be worthy of a free, en¬ 
lightened, and at no great distant period, a great nation, to 
give to mankind the magnanimous and too novel example 
of a people always guided by an exalted justice and benev¬ 
olence. Who can "doubt, that in the course of time and 
things, the fruits of such a plan wmuld richly repay any 
temporary advantages which might be lost by a steady ad¬ 
herence to it. Can it be that Providence has not connected 
the permanent felicity of a nation with its virtue"? The 
experiment, at least, is recommended by every sentiment 




54 


which ennobles human nature. Alas! is it rendered impos¬ 
sible by its vices ? 

“ In the execution of such a plan, nothing is more essen¬ 
tial than that permanen t inveterate antipathies against par¬ 
ticular nations, and passionate attachment for others, should 
be excluded ; and that in place of them, just and amicable 
feelings towards all should be cultivated. The nation that 
indulges towards another an habitual hatred, or an habit¬ 
ual fondness, is in some degree a slave. It is a slave to its 
animosity, or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to 
lead it astray, from its duty and its interest. Antipathy in 
one nation against another, disposes each more readily to 
offer insult and injury, to lay hold of slight causes of um¬ 
brage, and to be haughty and intractable, when accidental 
or trifling occasions of dispute occur. Hence frequent col¬ 
lisions, obstinate, envenomed and bloody contests. The 
nation prompted by ill-will and resentment, sometimes im¬ 
pels to war the government, contrary to the best calcula¬ 
tions of policy. The government sometimes participates in 
the national propensity, and adopts through passion, what 
reason would reject; at other times it makes the animosity 
of the nation subservient to projects of hostility, instigated 
by pride, ambition, and other sinister and pernicious mo¬ 
tives. The peace often, sometimes perhaps the liberty, of 
nations, has been the victim. 

“ So, likewise, a passionate attachment of one nation for 
another, produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the 
favourite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary 
common interest, in cases where no real common interest 
exists, and infusing into the one the enmities of the other, 
betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and 
wars of the latter, without adequate inducement or justifi¬ 
cation. It leads also to concessions to the favourite nation 
of privileges denied to others, which is apt doubly to injure 
the nation making the concessions, by unnecessarily part¬ 
ing with what ought to have been retained; and by exciting 
jealousy, ill-will, and a disposition to retaliate, in the par¬ 
ties from whom equal privileges are withheld ; and it gives 
to ambitious, corrupted, or deluded citizens (who devote 


55 


themselves to the favourite nation) facility to betray or 
sacrifice the interests of their own country, without odium, 
sometimes even with popularity; gilding with the appear¬ 
ance of a virtuous sense of obligation, a commendable 
deference to public opinion, or a laudable zeal for the pub¬ 
lic good, the base or foolish compliances of ambition, cor¬ 
ruption or infatuation. 

“ As the avenue to foreign influence in innumerable ways, 
such attainments are particularly alarming to tbe truely 
enlightened and independent patriot. How many opportu¬ 
nities do they afford to tamper with domestic factions, to 
practice the arts of seduction to mislead public opinion, to 
i influence or awe the public councils ! Such an attachment 
i of a small or weak, towards a great and powerful nation, 
dooms the former to be the satelite of the latter. 

“Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence, (I con¬ 
jure you to believe me, fellow citizens,) the jealousy of a 
free people ought to be constantly awake; since history and 
experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most 
baneful foes of a Republican government. But that jeal¬ 
ousy to be useful must be impartial; else it becomes the 
instrument of the very influence to be avoided, instead of a 
defence against it. Excessive partiality for one nation, and 
excessive dislike of another, cause those whom they actu¬ 
ate, to see danger only on one side, and serve to veil and 
even second the arts of influence on the other. Real patriots 
who resist the intrigues of the favourite, are liable to be¬ 
come suspected and odious; while the tools and dupes 
usurp the applause and confidence of the people to surren¬ 
der their interests. 

“ The great rule of couduct for us, in regard to foreign 
nations, is in extending our commercial relations, to have 
with them as little political connexion as possible. So far 
as we have already formed engagements, let them be ful¬ 
filled with perfect good faith. Here let us stop. Europe 
has a set of primary interests, which to us have none, or a 
very remote relation. Hence she must be engaged in very 
frequent controversies, the causes of which are essentially 
foreign to our concerns. Hence, therefore, it must be un- 




56 


wise in us to implicate ourselves, by artificial ties, in the 
ordinary vicissitudes of her politics, or the ordinary combi¬ 
nations and collisions of her friendships or enmities. 

“Our detached and distant situation invites and enables 
us to pursue a different course. If we remain one people, 
under an efficient government, the period is not far off, 
when we may defy material injury from external annoy¬ 
ance; when we may take such an attitude as will cause the 
neutrality we may at any time resolve upon, to be scrupu¬ 
lously respected. When belligerent nations, under the im¬ 
possibility of making acquisitions upon us, will not lightly 
hazard the giving us provocation ; when we may choose 
peace or war, as our interest, guided by justice, shall counsel*. 

“ Why forego the advantages of so peculiar a situation ? 
Why quit our own to stand upon foreign ground? Why 
by interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Eu¬ 
rope, entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of Eu¬ 
ropean ambition, rivalship, interest, humour or caprice? 

“ It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances 
With any portion of the foreign world; so far, I mean,as we 
are now at liberty to do it, for let me not be understood as 
capable of patronizing infidelity to existing engagements. 
I hold the maxim no less applicable to public, than to pri¬ 
vate affairs, that honesty is always the best policy. I re¬ 
peat it, therefore, let these engagements be observed in their 
genuine sense. But in my opinion, it is unnecessary and 
would be unwise to extend them. 

“Taking care always to keep ourselves by suitable es¬ 
tablishments in a respectable defensive posture, we may 
safely trust to temporary alliances for extraordinary emer¬ 
gencies. 

“ Harmony, liberal intercourse with all nations, are 
recommended by policy, humanity and interest. But even 
our commercial policy should hold an equal and impartial 
hand; neither seeking nor granting exclusive favours or 
preferences; consulting the natural course of things; diffus¬ 
ing and diversifying by gentle means the streams of com¬ 
merce, but forcing nothing; establishing with powers so 
disposed in order to give trade a staple course, to define the 


rights of our merchants, and to enable the government to 
support them, conventional rules of intercourse, the best 
that present circumstances and mutual opinion will permit, 
but temporary, and liable to be from time to time aban¬ 
doned or varied, as experience and circumstances shall 
dictate; constantly keeping in view, that it is folly for one; 
nation to look for disinterested favours from another; that 
it must pay with a portion of its independence for whatever 
it may accept under that character; that by such accept¬ 
ance, it may place itself in the condition of having given’ 
equivalents for nominal favours, and yet of being reproached 
with ingratitude for not giving more. There can be no 
greater error than to expect or calculate upon real favours 
from nation to nation. It is an illusion which experience 
must cure, which a just pride ought to discard. 

“ In offering to you, my countrymen, these counsels of an 
old and affectionate friend, I dare not hope they will make 
the strong impression I could wish : that they will control 
the usual current of passions, or prevent our nation from 
running the course which has hitherto marked the destiny 
of nations. But if I may even flatter mySelf that they may 
be productive of some partial benefit, some occasional good, 
that they may now and then recur to moderate the fury of 
party spirit, to warn against the mischiefs of foreign in¬ 
trigue, to guard against the impostures of pretended patri¬ 
otism ; this hope will be a full recompence for the solicitude 
for your welfare by which they have been dictated.” 

Here is every syllable of Washington’s speech, as regards 
foreign influence, and surely he must be a thorough-bred 
“ native,” who can discover one phrase in the whole against 
an Irishman or an Irish Catholic. The reader will clearly 
perceive that the great Patriot warned his countrymert 
against the baneful rock of foreign alliance, upon which 
ill-fated Ireland was ship-wrecked in 1800, when she 
formed a union with treacherous England. “ Europe,” 
says the great statesman, “ has a set of primary interests', 
which to us have no, or a very remote relation.” This 
was precisely the case with England, when Ireland was 
forced, under bribery, corruption, and martial law, to form 



58 


with her a union. Ireland owed a national debt of twenty 
millions of pounds, England at the same time owed four 
hundred and twenty millions. Could the Irish benefit by 
Washington’s counsel to his countrymen, they would ever 
leave England responsible for all her primary contracts. 
Tyrannical England, by kicking up a row with all nations, 
became an insolvent debtor to all her creditors, when Ire¬ 
land, who at all times cultivated peace with the world, was 
forced by the foul-dealing union, to be equally implicated 
in all her debts and calamities. This is obviously the kind 
of foolish alliance with foreign nations, against which 
Washington admonished all true-hearted Americans. By 
the present existing union between England and her sister 
country, the former may make as many absurd stipulations 
as her prodigality may lead her to, and then call upon the 
latter, who had neither act, part nor knowiedge of the 
transactions, to pay one half of all' Even the thousands 
of pounds distributed by the lovely Victoria, and her idol 
Albert last summer at the palace of the Belgian king, and 
“ round the world for sport,” though the regal pair alone 
enjoyed the pleasure, received the thanks, and kindest ac¬ 
knowledgments of the enriched recipients, yet Ireland, as 
linked to her sister country, is bound to pay her part. 

In warning Americans against the wiles of foreign influ¬ 
ence* Washington distinguished himself, no less a patriot 
than a statesman. All Republics should rest independent 
on their own basis, arid their citizens should ever be vigi¬ 
lant lest any external machinations should deceive or over¬ 
whelm them. But it should be borne in mind that they 
were Americans, English, Irish, Scotch, French, Germans, 
and men from all nations, that constituted the population 
whom Washington addressed. He could not, therefore, 
have meant that any body of foreigners, amalgamated with 
Americans, and whose best interests are interwoven with 
their, who swear eternal hatred to the land they left be¬ 
hind, and unswerving fidelity to their adopted country, 
could ever carry with them the elements of destruction to 
a land, made free by the noble-minded Foreign and Native 
patriots. It is not a poor oppressed body of foreign emigrants 


59 


Washington had in contemplation when he advised his 
countrymen to beware of foreign influence, but of the im¬ 
prudent and injudicious junction of their dear-bought Re¬ 
public with the destinies of European kingdoms, that while 
they may appear flourishing and impregnable at a distance, 
may be tottering on the brink of inevitable ruin. Nor could 
such a man ever have tolerated the “ Native” spirit, as ap¬ 
pears from his reiterated exhortations that Americans re¬ 
spect not one nation more than another. “Nothing,” he 
says, in the above quotation from his address, “ is more es¬ 
sential for our national prosperity, than that permanent, 
inveterate antipathies against particular nations, and pas¬ 
sionate attachments for others, should be excluded; and 
that in place of them, just and amicable feelings towards 
all should be cultivated.” Whence, then, this black, ma¬ 
lignant feeling against the Irish? Why are they thus 
detested by the “ Natives,” and singled out the particular 
object at whom all the poisoned arrows of their invectives 
and ill-founded prejudice are leveled and discharged ? 

Why do we see the smoke of their burning churches rise 
like incense to the throne of heaven, their altars—aye, the 
very graves of the dead ransacked, and the black ruins left 
as if to mock in the face of England, the liberty of famed 
America ? Impartial jealousy of all nations, was Wash¬ 
ington’s counsel; but the watchword of “ Natives” is to 
hate the Irish, as if they were traitors in the struggle for 
independence. Why is this ? Is it because the Irishman 
loses not as much of the sweat of his brow, for his daily 
bread, as any other man, and is not as strict an observer 
of the laws and institutions of the land in which he gains 
a livelihood ? No ! Such are not the causes of the oppo¬ 
sition which he finds from the “Natives.” But disguise it 
as they may, it is more a religious than a political question. 
The pool of bigotry is raked up from the lowest depths, 
by the nicknamed “ Native”.—The Irishman’s church 
blazes because he dares be a Catholic. This is what may 
truly be called plucking off the right wing of the eagle of 
liberty. Civil and religious liberty are the powerful pinions 
upon which she soars. The stronger of these is disabled 



60 


by the u Native,” and consequently the bird of freedom, 
instead of gazing at the blazing sun in the highest firma¬ 
ment, must fall and flutter at the feet of “ Natives.” No 
bird can rise high on one wing. Let these pretended 
Americans but blot out from the American Constitution 
religious liberty, and the world may behold an aristocracy, 
vile and detestable as that which cast the ‘Pilgrims’on the 
icy rocks of Plymouth. 

“If we remain one people under an efficient government, 
says Washington, the period is not far distant when we 
may defy material injury from external annoyances. 5 ’ His 
prophecy, by the spirit of union which bound freemen to¬ 
gether sixty-eight years, is now fully accomplished. But 
whom did he say should remain one people 1 American 
citizens, native and adopted. It is an adage worthy of re¬ 
membrance, for it is ancient as true, that “ a house divided 
against itself cannot stand. 1 ' While the inhabitants of 
Columbia live united-, and acknowledge but one common 
interest, the perpetuity of the freedom for which their 
fathers bled, they may ever proudly defy the encroachment 
of the tyrant, foreign or domestic. But should it ever hap¬ 
pen, (and may God in his mercy avert the calamity!) that 
they by party or sectional feuds among themselves, debili¬ 
tate each other’s strength, the watchful and designing foe 
may pounce upon the prey, in contention for which, like 
the fabled lion and tiger, they exhausted each other’s 
power, and rendered themselves too feeble to defend the 
prize for which they so spitefully contended. 

It seems to me lhat the God of impartial justice could 
not more conspicuously inculcate the spirit of unity by 
which Americans should be consolidated, than in the sage 
words which flowed from the lips of Washington. Nor 
could a prophet of the old law prognosticate more accu¬ 
rately the evils likely to accrue from an opposite course, 
than he in following words: 

“ A hatred of one nation, more than another, gives to 
ambitious, corrupted, or deluded citizens (who devote 
themselves to the favourite nation) facility to betray or 
sacrifice the interests of their own country, without odium, 


61 


sometimes even with popularity ; gilding with the appear-: 
ance of a virtuous scene of obligation, a commendable def¬ 
erence for public opinion, or a laudable zeal for public 
good, the base or foolish compliances of ambition, corrup¬ 
tion, or infatuation.” 

What American reading this extract, that will not per¬ 
ceive that great Washington, in the golden age of the re¬ 
public, anticipated the brawling “ Natives” of ’44 ! But 
admitting that fanaticism may one day overwhelm the 
only free resting-place of man, and that “ Natives” may 
possibly subvert the liberty of millions, to gratify their own 
sordid interests, let us ask how long could such a maimed 
government stand, on the prop of this “ Native American¬ 
ism ?” The influx of foreigners is immense, and the land 
to which they come fruitful and extensive. Admitting as 
the organ of the “ Natives” states, that tens of thousands 
of foreign paupers annually crowd our shores it is a fact 
too well known, that paupers make as good food for British 
cannon, as any silk-stocking gentlemen that line our thea¬ 
tres, and parade the Bowery and Broadway. Have not 
1776, and 1812, proved to Great Britain that a cannon 
ball as quickly perforated the superfine red coats of British 
officers, as the home-spun kersey of a Yankee farmer. If 
bullets then, serve alike the pauper and the gentleman, the 
poor foreigner may again be useful, when his country needs 
his services. The Average age at which foreigners arrive 
in this country, is about forty years. Tens of thousands 
of them every year escape the tyranny of their native soil, 
and enlist in the glorious ranks of freemen. Now, allow¬ 
ing for a moment that the over-reaching “ Natives” can so 
alter the American laws, as to require an actual residence 
of twenty-one years of all emigrants in the land, before 
they can exercise the rights of franchisement, What will 
be the natural result 1 Twenty-one multiplied by ten 
thousand, the supposed annual increase to our population, 
will amount to the considerable sum of 210,000. Now 
suppose twenty years after the arrival of the first ten thou¬ 
sand of these foreigners, the kingly powers of Europe 
should combine to conquer America, would not the “ Na- 



62 


lives” desire to raise as large a multitude of militia as pos¬ 
sible, to confront face to face, and bayonet to bayonet, the 
European tyrants ? The motto of the “ Natives” in '44, 
be it remembered, is, “ Native Americans are competent to 
make and administer their own laws.” 

The number of foreigners proscribed during these twenty 
years, by the above calculation, would be 200,000. These, 
the most bigoted “ Native” must acknowledge, would be 
no small acquisition to the American forces. When called 
upon to defend the eagle of liberty, would they not be per¬ 
fectly justified, to retort on the “ Natives,” and say “ If 
Native Americans are competent to make and administer 
their own laws, to the exclusion of all foreigners, they 
should likewise be able to fight their own battles ?” When 
Washington freed this land, and laid it open to the world, 
as a condigned reward to foreigners who bled by his side, 
he decreed that the short period of two years was suffi¬ 
ciently long for the probation of foreigners, at the expira¬ 
tion of which they should be entitled to citizenship, and 
identified with native-born Americans. As he prevented 
no true-hearted patriot from fighting his battles, he de¬ 
prived no man of his liberty. But you pretended natives, 
the walls of Jericho being levelled, bound us involuntary 
slaves, while the land of promise was flowing with milk 
and honey. You deemed us too contemptible to be sharers 
in your blessings ; now, when danger surrounds you on all 
sides, we deem ourselves too insulted to fight your bloody 
battles. “ Natives,” confront the foe, and we’ll keep tally. 
But should this great number of proscribed foreigners be 
unmindful of the insults they received at the hands of 
“ Natives”; should they, like the Roman Camillus, bury in 
oblivion the unpardonable wrongs inflicted by a lawless and 
misguided party, and as all patriots should do, espouse the 
cause of u equal liberty to all,” what would be the worth 
of such superanuate'd men in battle 1 The meridian of 
their life is spent in bondage. They were forty when they 
landed, and twenty being added, make up the silvery old 
age of sixty. At this evening of life, a wise man ought 
rather be preparing for eternity, than old Priam-like, in- 


63 


vesting himself in arms, and hurling his imbecile vveapons 
against the mail-clad warriors of younger days. By such 
“ Native” logic, a man must live twenty-one years a slave, 
hut when about to die, at the age of three score, he may 
then declare his intention, when the “ Natives” will hand 
him his first and last paper, which will serve as freedom’s 
passport to the gates of Heaven. So much for this hum¬ 
bug, “ Native Americanism.” So far does it accord with 
the views of George Washington. 

But the most grievous of the “ Natives’ ” complaints, and 
the most deserving reflection, if true, is that America is al¬ 
ready being governed by an “ infinity of aliens.” Persons 
so credulous as to believe prophet Miller’s burning up of 
the world, or the “ Pope’s invasion of the United States in 
’44,” may find ample space in the receptacle of their vacant 
minds, for a story so entirely vague,—so evidently prepos¬ 
terous. That foreigners can “rule America,” while in the 
Presidential chair, we find by the wisdom of time-honored 
patriots, a pure native-born is one of the most absurd ema¬ 
nations that ever escaped the brain-pan of an adle-pated 
“Native.” Why could not the whigs rule America with 
the rod of Iron, when in 1840, like the Moabites of old, 
they sent out a federal prophet, to curse the American peo¬ 
ple. Why could they not force a United States Bank, and 
blast the prosperity of the whole Republic! Bid they not 
in their undermining endeavors, level, by the aid of “ pipe- 
layers,” all opposition, until they presented the product of 
their perfidy to “ honest John Tyler,” who, as he loved his 
country more than the outlandish speculations of his ava¬ 
ricious" constituents, vetoed their schemes, when, like the 
“ tower of Babel,” tumbled down the United States Bank, 
to the surprise of all, and confusion of many tongues. 
Has not every President, like John Tyler, a veto? And 
no foreigner can be President. How then can the foreign¬ 
ers machinate any measure destructive to the government, 
that the ruling officer may not veto ? This is an incontro¬ 
vertible reason why foreigners, even if so disposed, can 
never overturn the institutions of this land. 

In the Philadelphia “ Native American,” of December 


64 


7, 1844, appeared the following article, extracted from a 
whig paper of Tennessee, edited by a Reverend Mr. Brown- 
low, whose second God, up to the last presidential election, 
was “ Cooney Clay.” It explicitly exhibits the condolence 
of our whig neighbours, their premeditated resolution, and 
how they consider all foreigners as so many thorns in their 
sides. Read and judge, “ We henceforth go the Native 
American ticket. And we warn the lovers of liberty* now 
that the next presidential contest—if ever another is fought 
*—must be fought upon this issue, and this alone. Not only 
has the last presidential election been carried by foreign 
voters, but every state and national election is carried by 
the same foreign influence. American citizens have wholly 
lost the control of their own affairs. Examine the facts. 
In Pennsylvania the,foreign vote amounts to 25,000, and 
these were nearly all cast for Polk, Texas and Free Trade. 
In New York there are 70,000 foreign votes, and these 
were cast in a body for the democratic ticket. In Ohio 
the foreign vote amounts to 75,000, and upon that immense 
influence depends the welfare of that great State. In Ma¬ 
ryland there are 20,000 foreign votes, and these were nearly 
all cast for the democrats. In Massachusetts there are 
15,000 foreign voters, and they make it their special busi¬ 
ness to go against the whig party. In Virginia the foreign 
voters are estimated at 10,000, restricted as the suffrages 
of that State are. In Indiana, Louisiana, Missouri, Illi¬ 
nois, South Carolina and Georgia, the American citizens 
are scarcely able to encounter this nefarious influence—an 
influence which is growing by tens of thousands every 
year, encouraged by these demagogues.” 

Pious language from a minister of the gospel! Dare a 
Catholic priest interfere so much in politics, his church, to 
pay the forfeit, would smoke in ruins. He mentions seven 
States, in which American citizens are scarcely able to en¬ 
counter this nefarious influence. Had he said, as a substi¬ 
tute “ Native Americans,” he would have broken the spell, 
and told truth. The Reverand Politician seems to forget, 
that a good American and a sound democrat , are synonimous 
terms. But he writes as if all Americans were arrayed 


on one side, and that by the baneful influence of foreigners 
on the other, they were signally defeated at the ballot-box. 
In the six States, whose foreign population he enumerates, 
the whole votes, by his own calculation, amount exactly 
to 215,000. Now, for argument sake, we will exceed this 
estimation, and as a greater “ eye-sore” to his Reverence , 
leave the foreign votes throughout the Union one million. 
According to the latest census of the United States, the 
whole inhabitants approximate to nineteen millions. 
Will the Reverend editor, for the enlightenment of his 
brethren and subscribers, explain the anomaly, and eluci¬ 
date as a miracle of the nineteenth century, how it can be 
possible that one million of foreign voters can overthrow 
the policy of nineteen millions of native-born Americans. 
To prove this, he must allow that one foreign vote falls as 
heavy in the ballot-box as nineteen native-born votes. 
Certainly, if all natives vote one way, and all foreigners 
the other, it is clear as the mid-day sun, that nineteen 
millions are more than one, and consequently Americans 
may rule their own “ affairs,” and that too by a very large 
majority. But since the result of every election proves 
that all Americans go not one way, but are divided into 
two large bodies, the crime of foreigners voting, as free¬ 
men, as they please, appears not quite so heinous, on 
closer investigation. The persecuted foreigner lands on 
American soil—he appears a stranger to all, and all around 
are strangers to him—he is forbidden to approach the bal¬ 
lot box for five years after his landing. By the laws of 
classic Greece, he might have taken his seat in the great 
court of Areopagus in a shorter time : for if he be not suf¬ 
ficiently initiated in the mystery of casting his vote inde¬ 
pendent, at the expiration of this period, in my judgment 
he would not, had he lived the age of Methuselah. During 
this judicious term of probation, unless he was bom sight¬ 
less, he cannot fail to perceive a difference between these 
two opposite parties of the very same soil. The first por¬ 
tal open to this requisite information is, to become ac¬ 
quainted with their names, and instructed in their princi¬ 
ples. On his first enquiry, he is told the one party denom 





66 


inate themselves whigs, the other democrats. But as easy 
may he straighten the curved rainbow,—pluck the stars 
from Heaven, or paint the various and changeable hues of 
the chameleon , as learn all the serpentine schemes and 
back-ground chicanery of the former. Certain it is, that 
some internal or external cause must have divided the 
children of the same land, else they would now be either 
all whigs or all democrats. This every foreigner should 
know, before he interferes in politics. A secret to himself* 
he listens while some time-honored American, whose locks 
are bleached with the frosts of ninety years,—who had 
lived when the politics of alb natives were, to free their 
land, and leave liberty a legacy to their children, requests 
to be heard, while he thus explains the primary cause of 
this wonderful dissension :— 

“ I was bom in Rockland county, in 1754. I had been 
twenty-one years of age, when the first drop of Revolu¬ 
tionary blood was spilled at Concord. Like the blood 
of Abel, it cried to Heaven, and rang in the ears of 
Americans. Liberty ! Liberty ! ! Liberty !! ! reverbera¬ 
ted from hill to hill, and re-echoed from valley to valley. 
Then the plough-share was changed to a sword, and the 
farmer to a soldier. Young as I had been, I found the 
sensations of liberty swell my breast, and my only wish 
was to light, as a youthful patriot, the battles of my coun¬ 
try. Under Washington I obtained my wish. Believe 
me, for these wounds, which once discharged a flow of my 
vital fluid, and proved my courage in the van of armies. 
I laid my hand on Major Andre, when captured at Tarry- 
town, conducted him to Washington’s head-quarters, at 
Tappan, saw him confined in the old “ 76” stone house, 
and accompanied him to the adjacent hill, where he died 
for the royalty of England. 

By loyalty and valor, which eclipsed the traditionary 
legends of Rome or Greece, I saw the flag of my country 
wave in triumph, and British soldiers blasted like stones 
from a quarry, before I returned to my rural habitation, 
and the dear companion of my bosom. At this time there 
tvas but one party. The foul spirit, discord, never found 


67 


access to the temple of liberty. But as in Heaven there 
was war among the angels, so in America a political 
disunion broke out among the very men whose blood 
was commingled on the battle-ground, and who, when 
cannon smoke obscured the sun, defended the honor of 
Columbia. 

John Adams, a man as beloved before the Revolution, 
as since detested, may justly be called the Lucifer of Amer¬ 
ican discord. Ambition, that delusive passion, that raises 
man above his natural position, and hides from view ap¬ 
proaching ruin, laid him low and flat, at the first onset of 
his glory. How true it is, that the higher a body rises by 
the laws of gravitation, the more forcible and great will be 
its downfall. He was among the first that espoused the 
cause of liberty, and the first to go swop her for the demon 
intolerance. It may be said of him as of Manlius—he was 
the first that saved his country, and the first to betray her. 
Being made second President after Washington, he became 
the high priest of federalism,—instituted the “ alien and 
sedition laws,” by which every President would bo im- 
powered, without either crime or trial, to proscribe all 
foreigners, banished and sent over by the oppression of 
their own land. Under these laws, such would be the ab¬ 
solute power of the President, that he would be a despot 
in every thing but name. Should he become ambitious of 
wearing the ensignia of royalty, he might wear the crown 
and assume the sceptre; yet he who dared write a single 
paragraph derogatory to his dignity, or opposed to his 
usurpation, or raise his voice in public against any act of 
his, no matter how foul or unjust, would be constrained 
to atone for his assurance, by penalty and incarceration. 
By the sedition law of 98, Mathew Lyons, an editor of a 
newspaper, who published an article condemnitory of the 
proscriptive spirit of this Adams, was sentenced to four 
months’ imprisonment, and a fine of one thousand dollars. 
During Van Buren’s administration, to wipe off the stain 
from the star-spangled banner, to the confusion of whigs, 
Congress decreed that the whole amount should be paid 
back, when his heirs received the sum of $1,060,96, as an 




evidence of the honesty of democracy. This obliterated 
the last blemish left behind, by the alien and sedition lavys 
of John Adams. John Adams was the first whig,—his 
first political opponent was Thomas Jefferson. To this 
patriot’s pen the world is indebted for that incomparable 
document, the Declaration of Independence. Although 
Adams subscribed his name to this, his “ alien and sedi¬ 
tion laws, when he came into power, gave a direct lie to 
the assertion—“ all men are created equal.” To prove 
man, the sceptre of power must be put into his hand. Had 
Jefferson agreed with Adams, not one feature, by which a 
republic could be distinguished from a kingdom, would 
have remained twenty years after the establishment of the 
“ alien and sedition laws.” 

Jefferson, to hand down unsullied to children unborn, the 
freedom of the Republic,—to batter down the walls of sep¬ 
aration, raised by the old whig, between the native and 
adopted citizen, and to hebetate for ever the shafts of 
prejudice hurled against the latter, marched from the 
bigot’s camp bearing a banner, on which was inscribed the 
following inscription:— 

“ Natives and foreigners bled for our country—as 

THERE WAS NO DIFFERENCE IN THEIR BLOOD, THEY SHALL FIND 
NO DIFFERENCE IN OUR GOVERNMENT.” 

All Americans whose hearts were free from tyranny, fol¬ 
lowed Jefferson, whom they hailed as their great democratic 
leader. All these assumed the name of democrats, or 
friends to the people, and hence the origin of democracy. 
This name they retained, unchangeable as the sun in his 
diurnal course, to the present day. But, foreigner, should 
you doubt the veracity of these words—should you suspect 
an old man of the revolutionary school, whose blood flowed 
for the freedom of mankind, as capable of diverting your 
course from the temple of liberty, read the banners of both 
parties, and if my words correspond not with their every¬ 
day actions, believe me not. u You are already of age, 
judge for yourself.” 

All this time the foreigner is silent. The account given 
of the origin of both parties, and the principles they uphold, 


69 


by the revolutionary patriot, leaves not a shadow of doubt 
behind; yet willing to test occular demonstration, he reads 
the banners borne by both parties, as they pass before him 
in succession. die first he beholds is a whit* procession 
wliOk-G emblems aie lo^ cabins, coons, corn-cobs, and hard 
cider. The first banner that approaches, reads thus: “ We 
want a revival of the alien and sedition laws, and an alter¬ 
ation of the naturalization laws so that foreigners must be 
slaves twenty-one years in this land.” 

On the next he reads Senator Root’s opinion of all for¬ 
eigners, particularly Irish Catholics : “ Foreigners are pau¬ 
pers, strangers, sojourners, loafers, and other cattle, who' 
contribute not one cent to to the maintenance of the gov¬ 
ernment, and are not found, save on the day of election, 
and are never seen afterwards. They swear falsely with 
perfect impunity as respects punishment in this world, and 
according to whose faith, perhaps the price of a day’s labor, 
gives them absolute security for the next.” 

The third that meets his eye, is grandly decorated with 
orange and blue ribands. Is this Native Americanism ! 
It appears to be the identical banner, carried by the Orange¬ 
men of the North of Ireland, every 12th of July, when they 
rush forth in lawless, blood-thirsty gangs, to assassinate 
“Papists,” and reap the fruits of an “ Orangeman’s Oath.” 
His suspicion is confirmed, when he hears the “ Native” 
band play up in their march through Broadway, under the 
out-stretched wings of Columbia’s eagle: “King William 
over the water” Though garbed in a Native American 
mask, he instantly recognizes the same orange or tory 
party that left him a pennyless stranger in a strange land. 

u To h-ll with the Pope , and burn his Churches /” echoes 
from the profane lips of thousands of these “ Native” 
Orangemen. He then recollects that his Satanic Majesty 
once changed himself into an angel of light; yet notwith¬ 
standing his angelical appearance externally, he was still 
the same malignant spirit that tempted our first parents in 
Eden,—the infernal enemy to the human race. He instantly 
sees with unerring eyes, that whether under the name of 
whigs, natives, or federals, their works are purely* Orange. 




r- 


70 

Sad experience long since told him the farther he keeps 
aloof from all such bigots, the more prosperous will be his 
fortune. 

The followers of Jefferson next pass by. Unfurled to 
the gentle gale, appears in bold relief: “Civil and Reli¬ 
gious Liberty!! Unbounded as the globe upon which 

WE STAND, IS THE FREEDOM OF AMERICA ! ! ! It IS NOT THE 
PECULIAR PROPERTY OF ANY ONE MAN, BUT THE COMMON POR¬ 
TION OF ALL GOOD CITIZENS, NATIVE AND ADOPTED, BEQUEATHED 
TO THEM AS THE MOST PRECIOUS OF LEGACIES, BY THE PATRIOTS 

of “ 76 .” The Tree of our Liberty was planted for 

THE PERSECUTED OF THE WHOLE WORLD. UNDER ITS SPREAD¬ 
ING BRANCHES AND REVIVING FOLIAGE, MAY FREELY AND SE¬ 
CURELY RECLINE THE WEARY STRANGER, ENJOY ITS COOLING 
SHADE, AND LIVE FOREVER ON THE FRUITS OF ITS INDEPEN¬ 
DENCE.” 

The next that follows, as a direct contradiction to the 
spurious calumnies of that disreputable tory, Senator Root, 
is an extract of a letter, written by the illustrious founder 
of the Republic, to the Catholics of the United States, im¬ 
mediately after his being elected to the presidential chair. 
Anxious to learn Washington’s opinion of the Irish Cath¬ 
olics, when mens’ souls were tried in the cause of human¬ 
ity, the foreigner reads as follows : 

“ As mankind become more liberal, they will be more 
apt to allow that all those who conduct themselves as wor¬ 
thy members of the community, are equally entitled to the 
protection of civil government. I hope ever to see America 
amongst the foremost nations in examples of justice and 
liberality. And I presume, that your fellow citizens will 
not forget the patriotic part which you took in the accom¬ 
plishment of their revolution, and the establishment of their 
government, or the important assistance which they re¬ 
ceived from a nation in which the Roman Catholic faith is 
professed.” George Washington. 

The foreigner comparing this extract with the “Natives’ ” 
opinion of Roman Catholics, at once is impressed with the 
idea that Washington was as good a Native American 
as Mr. Q,uackenboss, Rev. Mr. Brownlow, or the “Native” 


71 


of Rockland comity, and had a little better right to be ac¬ 
quainted with the merits or demerits of this maligned class 
of citizens, than any of these splinters blasted from the old 
rock of federalism. He knows that the world pronounce 
Washington to have been a disinterested citizen—a man 
who never advanced one step in his country’s cause for self 
aggrandizement; whose sole ambition was to see his coun¬ 
try the purest of nations; yet he never in all his addresses, 
in all his writings, admonished his countrymen against the 
i; ‘‘Pope’s visit to America in 1845.” He never said that Cath¬ 
olics would betray their trust, or that they never opened 
a sanctuary in Maryland, when the dragon Persecution out¬ 
stretched her wings for the punishment of harmless Qua¬ 
kers. On the contrary, he recommends them to liberal- 
minded Americans, as a people unsparing of their blood, 
who rendered him invaluable services when young Amer¬ 
ica was struggling to shake off the manacles, forged and 
rivetted by the tyrants of the old world. “He hopes to see 
America ever amongst the foremost nations in examples of 
justice and liberality.” How far this Christian hope would 
be realized under the “Native” administration, the poor 
foreigner may read on the sable banners that unfurl their 
contracted folds from the “ Nalive” head quarters, or Na¬ 
tional Hall. 

Under the “alien and sedition laws” of Adams, and un¬ 
der every whig administration since the foundation of the 
Republic, (which, thank God, are very few) the foreigners 
of every country were cruelly oppressed, and considered as 
an inferior remnant of the human creation. But as the 
brightest angels, compared to the blackest demons, were 
the rankest of wliigs to these unblushing office hunters, that 
under the appearance of patriotism, endeavor to wrest the 
reins of government, and raise the fabric of “ Native” great¬ 
ness on the black, smoking ruins of Catholic churches. 
Their chief motto they have borrowed from Roboam’s ad¬ 
dress to the people of Israel: “ Our fathers made your yoke 
heavy , but ice will add to your yoke ; Our fathers beat you 
with whips , but ice will beat you with scorpions ” 

If thus the foreigner finds every action, every move of 



72 


the federal or “native" party, corroborating the statement 
of the true American—if he finds on one side insults, bigotry, 
proscription, and slavery, while on the other he sees the 
bright sun of freedom dispelling the clouds of toryism, and 
sheding his nurturing rays alike on the native and adopted 
citizen, should he be pronounced culpable or ignorant if he 
turns his back to the enemies of their own country, and 
give his hand and vote for the wider spread of democracy ! 
Certainly no foreigner, save an Orangeman , whose politi¬ 
cal creed is to join the aristocracy of any land, could ever 
vote for a party so near-sighted in their views—so inimical 
to Republican liberty. 

With as much propriety may the fowler who spreads his 
nets for the capture of wild-pigeons, curse the sagacious 
birds, which sensible, as it were, of nature's first law, self 
preservation, choose rather to feed on freedom's element, 
than fall into the bloody hands of their relentless execu¬ 
tioner, as “natives to hate and curse an Irishman, who, un¬ 
willing to be a slave, avoids the toils of toryism, in which 
he was once entangled, and which lie fortunately escaped 
by coming to America. Should they desire to get the 
adopted citizen's vote, they must no longer pursue the road 
to violence. They must pursue a more virtuous course, 
than that in which they have trodden, since they first ap¬ 
peared in the political arena. The most ignorant foreigner 
that ever crossed the Atlantic, is at least capable of knowing 
his left hand from his right—his tory enemy from his demo¬ 
cratic friend. He may, indeed, be branded the child of want 
and ignorance, by the monsoon of slavery that rages over his 
native land, but the three powers of the soul, implanted in 
his bosom by the common Father of all, no “Native” can 
subvert—naught but death can take away. 

Grateful to the American people, for the asylum they 
opened for his reception; for the balm they applied to his 
bleeding wounds, he considers it an act of bounden duty to 
vote for the best interests of the land in which he lives 
beyond the tyrant's grasp. This he knows to be democracy. 
The greatest liberty to the greatest number, is the greatest 
blessing to any nation. This he can only lind among the 


73 


lriends of Jefferson. This was recommended by the four 
props upon which our liberty rests, Washington, Jefferson, 
Franklin, and Madison. If “Natives” desire to reach the 
goal of their ambition, they will leave all churches stand 
ing, until such time as Jehovah may ordain to burn them 
with ligntning from the heavens. One, or a few dozen, of 
fanatics, are not infallible judges of the religious belief of 
millions. God alone knows the purity or corruption of the 
human heart. Leave, then, all religions to the mercy of 
God. He consumed the ancient cities, Sodom aud Gomoi- 
roh, because of their wickedness, without a “ Natives’ ” 
torch. Had he considered Catholic countries, Catholic 
cities, and Catholic churches, equally criminal, he would, 
for the pleasure and gratification of “ Natives,” long since 
have visited the earth with other showers of fire and brim¬ 
stone. They should bear in mind, that “zeal without re¬ 
ligion is a fire without light.” 

Having thus briefly delineated the true cause of the 
Irishman’s emigration,—his unshaken love of liberty,—his 
tried prowess in the van of danger, and his firm attach¬ 
ment to American institutions, it only remains to assure 
all Americans that, far from being hostile, or opposed to 
them in the slightest degree, he loves them dearer than any 
other people. It is universally admitted, that the true 
characteristic of the Irish is, that they are impatient of in¬ 
jury, and mindful of favors. The injury received over his 
father’s grave, is engraven on his very soul, for which he 
pants to strike a deadly blow against the government of 
England ;—while the freedom he obtains from Ameri¬ 
cans,—the cordial welcome he receives on his landing, 
bind him as indissoluble to their land and institutions, as 
any native-born. 

The American, having been rocked in the cradle of lib¬ 
erty, as a matter of course, knows more of freedom than 
the Irishman ; but the latter, conceived in bondage, and 
brought forth in chains, has felt more keenly the pangs of 
oppression, than all Americans in the world, and conse¬ 
quently is, by nature, and nature’s God, an ardent lover of 
liberty. Though the child of want, he drank the milk of 

10 




74 


democracy from his mother’s breast, and every succeeding 
act of the tyrant, but weaned his affections from his en¬ 
slaved home, and paved his road to republican liberty. 

To appreciate the enjoyment of sound health, it must be 
valued after long, painful sickness. He who never felt a 
moment’s pain, must be a very poor judge of the pangs of 
a burning fever. The doctor, who administers medicine to 
mitigate the torments of the agonized sufferer, can better 
judge the efficacy of the antidote, than the excruciating 
pains that confine the patient to his bed. Thus it is, that 
the Irishman, recovered from the malady of tory oppression, 
is better able to appreciate the blessings he enjoys under 
the benign influence of freedom, than he who only knows 
slavery by name. As the most illiterate man is capable of 
feeling an indisposition of his own body, and his recovery 
to sound health, so he may be able to judge accurately be¬ 
tween the gaping wound, inflicted by slavery, and the sana¬ 
tive balm applied by the angelic hand of freedom. He must 
be truly more depraved than ignorant who can not tell the 
aspect and advance of toryism, even in its most disguised 
shape. “The tree is known by its fruit,” and toryism by 
the distinction it makes in mankind, and its domineering 
sway in every kingdom throughout the world. To oppose 
this Hydra in any land, is the Irishman’s firm and avowed 
principles, aware that: 

“ A monster more fell, offended heaven ne’er sent 
From hell’s abyss for human punishment.” 

In doing this he proves grateful to the land of his adop¬ 
tion, and merits the confidence of every good American. 
To assist the enemies of democracy would be in reality 
subverting the best interests of the masses of the people, 
and changing a republic, the common property of all, into 
an oligarchy, that a few might rule with a rod of iron, and 
aggrandize themselves on their country’s ruin, and at the 
expense of the labouring millions. A slave whose shoul¬ 
ders were ever lacerated with the thong of the cruel slave¬ 
holder, and who fortunately escaped the author of his 
shameful sufferings, could not be expected to promote, so 
much, the power and welfare of his infamous task-master, 


75 


from whom he received but stripes and fiagelation, as that 
of a merciful and clement benefactor, who shields him from 
slavery, and acknowledges him a friend, a companion, and 
a brother. Were he on his being emancipated, to exert 
all the faculties of his soul in direct opposition to all the 
measures of his kind protector, for the reinstatement into 
power, ol his demoralizing enslaver, what living man that 
would not pronounce him a wretch, too abject to live a 
freeman—the fittest animal to wear a tyrant’s yoke! Such, 
I know, would be the prevalent opinion of all Americans 
against the long-enslaved Irishman, if after breaking 
through the barrier of lordly oppression, and reaching this 
“land of pomisef he could be so morally depraved as to 
forge the galling chains of future subjugation, and subject 
himself, and children unborn, to the misrule of ambitious and 
designing demagogues, who, like a Roman Nero, would 
regale themselves with the flames of their bnrning country, 
and quaff “hard cider” ’mid cinders and desolation. Against 
private men of any sect, creed or country, the Irishman en¬ 
tertains no antipathy : he respects and honours all men as 
he finds them. He believes that, religiously or politically, 
man should be entitled to his unshackled opinion; as a 
member of the human family, he contends for this and no 
more. Take free will from man, and instead of his being 
the “ noblest work of God,” he becomes the most worthless 
and despicable creature, that moves upon the earth. This 
the haughty minions of limited power and grinding aristo¬ 
cracy have attempted. As the wolf feeds upon the lamb, 
the shark upon smaller fishes, and the hawk upon birds of 
inferior size, so toryism has subsisted in every land on the 
poor man’s sweat and toil. The one may plough and sow,— 
the other reap all benefits. 

If it be criminal to oppose this, it must be confessed none 
can be blacker in guilt than Irishmen, throughout the 
world. For the scanty living they obtain at the hands of 
“ Whigs,” or “ Natives,” they are willing to erect expen¬ 
sive rail-roads,—fell the sturdy oaks of immeasurable for¬ 
ests,—excavate the most pestilential canals, and leave 
their employers the lighter end of every undertaking ; but 


76 

to be forced to barter their conscience on the day of elec¬ 
tion,—to vote for the enemies of their creed and country, 
for the sake of employment, or any other selfish considera¬ 
tion, is about as foreign to an Irishman’s principle, as time 
to eternity—as opposite as vice to virtue. From his in¬ 
fantile days, he beheld England, a destructive volcano in 
the centre of Europe, emiting from its yawning crater the 
calid lava of damning persecution, from one end of Ireland 
to the other. Unable to live free, in the land of his fa¬ 
thers, he embarks for a wester world, well knowing that— 

“ A day, an hour of virtuous liberty, 

Is worth a whole eternity in bondage.” 

Bearing in mind the slavery to which nine millions of 
his countrymen are subjects,—confident that America is 
the only part of God‘s earth, where he can be free,—and 
that the baneful influence of toryism is a blighting pesti¬ 
lence, which cripples the best energies of man, infects his 
soul, and sinks him on a level with the “ brute creation,” 
he stands, the luknble, but fearless advocate of equal 
rights,—the unvacillating friend to Jeffersonian democ¬ 
racy. But in the free exercise of this great prerogative, 
he is envied, slandered, and misrepresented. All that 
purple-headed bigotry, rank whiggery, and sacrilegious 
a Native Americanism ” can rake from the profundity of the 
Hartford Convention, rolls a muddy and impetuous torrent 
against him ; but, as truth annihilates falsehood, his polit¬ 
ical integrity rises above the grasp of malice,—his services 
are appreciated by every noble-minded American. The 
freedom, civil and religious, for which a Washington 
fought, and a Warren bled, is the boon for which an Irish¬ 
man leaves home. To escape a tyrant’s chains,—to dis¬ 
embark, a friendless exile on a strange shore,—to swear 
undying hostility to all European despots,—to supplicate 
protection at the temple of liberty ; and to devote his fu¬ 
ture life and fortunes to the best interests of his adopted 
home, are crimes so sable and unpardonable in an Irish¬ 
man, that nothing save an involuntary endurance of twen¬ 
ty-one years slavery, can mollify the hatred of our A meri- 


can “Natives,” or elevate his condition above the level of 
“ a brute.” If any other man goes wrong, in his opinion 
it is absolutely because tc fie knows no better.” Should 
the temple of the living God blaze by a “ Native’s” brand, 
it must be attributed to his excess of piety; but for an 
Irishman to vote, agreeably to his opinion, is, u of course” 
a thousand times more wicked than to burn Philadelphia 
from end to end, down to ruins and charcoal. 

Having briefly, but imperfectly attained the object 
of my writing, by laying before the impartial reader the 
true causes of Irish emigration, together with the consistency 
or inconsistency of “ Native Americanism” as it is, it only 
remains to offer a friendly and wholesome advice to our 
misguided “ Natives,” as they have already reached the 
apex of their ambition. Hour after hour we see this raging 
tide of 11 Nativeism” ebbing to its last. We see them by 
rapid strides descend the slippery hill of political disap¬ 
pointment, and all their glory vanish, like a shadow when 
the sun enrobes himself in the centre, of a cloud. The 
frowns and scoff's of a free people meet them at every cor¬ 
ner, while the spectre, proscription, deprives them of their 
sleep, their freedom, and understanding. 

At such a time, it is charitable to advise. Let the “ Na¬ 
tives” become thinking men, and they will find all men 
alike,—the creatures of the same God—the inhabitants of 
the one world. Let charity, without which man is unwor¬ 
thy of his erect position, possess and inhabit their black 
and clouded minds. Let them, before they evaporate their 
unwarrantable animosity against the whole population of 
long-enslaved Erin, learn the manly and forgiving spirit of 
the"Irish they condemn. Let them reflect on the intolera¬ 
ble opppresrion, that, like a blasting hurricane, swept with 
irresistible violence over that unhappy portion of the 
world, during the last six hundred years; and, above all, 
deeply impress it, if possible, on shallow minds, that since 
the earliest propagation of the holy faith in Asia—since 
the serpent’s head was crushed on “ Calvary,” not one 
solitary proselyte was ever converted, either to religion or 
politics, by the conflagration of a Catholic Church. Let 



78 


them leave all men to their own will, as well before the 
altar of God, as at the ballot-box,—forgive the human 
frailty and imperfections of thetiberty-seeking Irishman,— 
blot from their clouded minds the sable rancour that feeds 
upon their souls; and when they witness, with a “ Na¬ 
tive’s” eye, the exile’s omission in a strange land, let them 
not snatch the brand of an incendiary, but with more 
learned sages remember, that—“ Hamanum est errare ” 
No man, save a “ Native,” can hate an Irishman. 


** His hand is rash, his heart is warm, 
But principle is still his guide ; 

None more regrets a deed of harm, 

And none forgives with nobler pride ; 
He may be duped, but wont be dared, 
As fit to practice as to plan, 

He dearly earns his poor reward, 

And spends it like an Irishman ! ?> 


Soon shall appear the hidden things and tory-laws of 
Piermont 





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LB Mr ’10 










WHAT BRINGS SO MANY IRISH TO AMERICA!" 
A PAMPHLET 


VRITTEN BY'HIBERNICUS: 


ONE PART OF WHICH 

EXPLAINS THE MANY CAUSES 


OF 


IRISH EMIGRATION; 

THE OTHER 

THE CONSISTENCY OR INCONSISTENCY 


OF 


iC Native Americanism” as it is. 




!t Yes, brother, curse with me that baleful hour 
When first Ambition struck at regal power; 

And thus polluting honour in its source, 

Gave wealth to sway the mind with double force, 
Have we not seen, round Britain’s peopled shore, 
Her useful sons- exchanged for useless ore; 

Seen all her triumphs but destruction haste, 

Like flaring tapers bright’ning as they waste; 
Seen opulence her grandeur to maintain, 

Lead stern depopulation in her train, 

And over fields where scattered hamlets rose, 

In barren solitary pomp repose 1 
Have we not seen at pleasure’s lordly call, 

The smiling long-frequented village fall; 

Beheld the duteous son, the sire decay’d, 

The modest matron, and the blushing maid, 
Forc’d'from their homes, a melancholy train, 

To traverse climes beyond the. western main ; 
Where wild Oswego spreads her swamps around, 
And Niagara stuns with thund’ring sound V’ 


PUBLISHED FOR THE AUTHOR: 
New York, February 6 , 1845 . 



























































































































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